Goya

by Robert Hughes

  To make sure his client felt adequately flattered, Goya included another, quite separate emblem of Floridablanca’s cultural altitude: on the floor lies a hefty leather-bound folio volume with what appears to be a small painting (now illegible, but how one would like to know what it was!) inserted between its pages like a bookmark. This tome was considered the summit of educated pictorial taste by Spaniards in the late eighteenth century: it is the Práctica de la pintura (1724), a treatise by a Spanish follower of Luca Giordano, Antonio Palomino (bap. 1655-1726). Palomino, the outstanding Spanish fresco painter of his time, was also known as the Spanish Vasari for his more than 250 essays on Spanish artists, gathered in 1724 as El Parnaso español pintoresco laureado, and his volume on mathematics, perspective, and artists’ techniques, El museo pictórico y escala óptica, 1715-24, which is the one we see on Floridablanca’s floor. Clearly, Goya wants us to know, the count is a man who wants to grasp not only the story of artists’ lives, with their attendant gossip, but something much more serious and recherché: a treatise on the nuts and bolts of art, the theory of painting, which would concern only a professional or a real connoisseur. So when we look at Goya’s Floridablanca, we see a man of deep theoretical and practical culture.

  Despite the obsequiousness of the portrait, the sitter was not particularly thrilled by it—which is strange, considering what an impressive apparition it makes today in the boardroom of the Banco de España in Madrid. The prime minister was not given to hyperbole, especially when dealing with social inferiors like painters, who in general enjoyed a status not far above carpenters. Hard put to conceal his disappointment, Goya wrote to his bosom friend Zapater that “there is nothing new to report, and there is still more silence about my business with Señor Moñino than when I painted his portrait.… The most he said to me after liking it [was] ‘Goya, we will see each other again when I have more time to spend, and apart from that I’ve nothing more to say.’ ”17

  Yet though Floridablanca did not strew Goya’s praises all over Madrid society, something was happening to Goya’s reputation in the early 1780s. Although no letters survive to document it, he would seem to have been getting good word of mouth from a commission to paint the family of Don Luis de Borbón, which he began soon after completing Floridablanca’s portrait in 1783.

  Don Luis was the brother of Carlos III, an unsuccessful younger brother who had made the large mistake of abandoning the career his parents had marked out for him, that of the Church, and marrying a much younger woman, not even for property but for love. His mother, Isabella Farnese, would not hear of any choice for him but the priestly life, which poor Don Luis could not stand—he was so ill-suited to celibacy that in later years Luis Paret, a charming and gifted Rococo painter employed by Carlos III at the Madrid court, became Don Luis’s unofficial pimp. This so annoyed the king, his prudish brother, that he had Paret banished to Puerto Rico from 1775 to 1778. (Paret returned to Spain but settled in Bilbao; he would not be allowed back into Madrid until 1785, the year Don Luis died.)

  Don Luis had been appointed the cardinal-archbishop of Toledo when he was only seven, and became the archbishop of Sevilla in 1741, at the age of fourteen. He had absolutely no aptitude for the religious life, and was never actually ordained a priest (the usual prelude to higher ecclesiastical titles), so he was able, though much against the will of his family, to renounce his position in the Church and in 1776 to marry an Aragonese countess, María Teresa de Vallabriga (1758-1820). She was not of royal blood, and Carlos III, feeling that his brother’s choice of her as a bride had insulted the dignity of the Bourbons, bitterly snubbed them both: Luis was stripped of the right to be called an infante or to use the surname Borbón, and although he was allowed to visit Carlos at court, his wife was forbidden to go with him. Carlos took this freeze-out to such absurd lengths that he even refused to hear any family news from his younger brother, getting it instead through “back channels,” from his prime minister, Floridablanca.

  Goya, The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Bourbón, 1783. Oil on canvas, 248 × 330 cm. Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Corte di Mamiano, Parma. (illustration credit 4.18)

  To work on Don Luis’s family portrait, Goya was invited to his palace at Arenas de San Pedro, a day’s ride from Madrid. It was the second visit the painter had made there, and clearly he got on well with Don Luis, since both men loved hunting and went shooting together. But Goya did not have in mind a figure of Don Luis alla cacciatore, in the field with his gun, as he would later paint both Carlos III and Carlos IV. Very much under the spell of Velázquez’s Las meninas, he would paint a large and ambitious conversation piece: The Family of the Infante Don Luis (1783) is almost eleven feet wide and contains fourteen figures, all portraits (an effort comparable in size and complexity to the group portrait Goya would make of the family of Carlos IV in 1800). It is the sort of painting that only a man determined to impress future clients would make, and—significantly—Goya again painted himself into it, as he had done in the Floridablanca portrait, crouching before the easel at the far left of the canvas.

  The center is occupied by Don Luis and his consort, sitting at a green-baize-covered card table. The infante is playing patience with large, vividly marked cards. The Spanish name for this game is solitario. Perhaps this was Goya’s way of slyly emphasizing Don Luis’s isolation within the Bourbon dynasty. The center of interest, and of the painting itself, is defined by the light source: a single candle in a plain glass draft shield. Most of the light falls on Doña Teresa de Vallabriga, who—this being an informal occasion, a country weekend—is wearing a white peignoir. Her hair is down, and a gray-jacketed peluquero, or hairdresser, is absorbed in braiding it. There is a pronounced contrast, but not at all a satiric one, between the youthful face of Doña Teresa and the alert but aging countenance of her husband. On either side of the card table, various members of Don Luis’s (relatively) small household court are arrayed, watching to see how the game of solitario turns out. Goya sets up a nice variety of expressions on their faces, culminating in the cheeky grin of Francisco del Campo, the court secretary, who wears an odd-looking white headband, perhaps a bandage of some kind.18 To the left, behind Don Luis, are two of his and Doña María Teresa’s children: in profile, in a blue jacket, Don Luis María; and beside him, the round, enraptured face of three-year-old María Teresa de Borbón y Vallabriga, whom Goya had painted previously in her full French finery as a child petimetra, standing on a terrace before a mountain landscape with her shaggy white terrier. Here she is clearly fascinated, wondering what this man is up to with his pencil, brush, and canvas. Years later, in 1800, she would become the subject of one of Goya’s subtlest and most deeply felt portraits as the condesa de Chinchón, Manuel Godoy’s much-humiliated and constantly betrayed wife. But now she is only a child.

  Goya, María Teresa de Borbón y Vallabriga, 1783. Oil on canvas, 132.3 × 116.7 cm. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (illustration credit 4.19)

  Goya, Conde de Altamira, 1786-87. Oil on canvas, 177 × 108 cm. Banco de España, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.20)

  Goya, Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga, c. 1790s. Oil on canvas, 127 × 101 cm. The Jules Bache Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (illustration credit 4.21)

  The lukewarm response among painters and cognoscenti to Goya’s painting of St. Bernardino at San Francisco el Grande had disappointed Goya. No matter: he would concentrate on portraiture.

  In 1785 he landed a commission to paint the portraits of the directors of a newly founded financial institution, the National Bank of San Carlos. The results were in the main mediocre, as paintings; but the clients did not think so, and the commission installed Goya with considerably more security as a social portraitist in Madrid. The main figure among them was the count of Altamira. Painting him brought forth Goya’s reserves of tact: Altamira was extremely short, indeed almost a midget, but he had to be flattered, not only because he was a banker and a member of
the old nobility but because he had inherited a most distinguished collection. In Goya’s rendering of him (1786-87), the count and the room are out of scale: he sits in what ought to be a commanding posture at a yellow-draped table, but the table is too big for him, so that in the resulting portrait he looks like a doll dressed as a powerful banker, a slightly unearthly manikin owned by an overly large child. This stiffness of gesture and awkwardness of pose is common to most of the banquier portraits that flowed from this commission.

  Altamira was very pleased with his portrait, and almost immediately commissioned three more of his family. The Countess of Altamira and Her Daughter (1787-88) shows his wife seated on a pale-blue silk sofa, the child on her knee. The mother’s face is a white mask of powder, “Japanese” in its inexpressiveness. Goya has brought to this work all his considerable skills as a painter of surfaces: the countess’s pale-pink satin skirt, embroidered and sprigged, is done with marvelous subtlety, every fold in the fabric given its specific weight of attention, the whole composition pulled into focus by an eccentric spot of light just behind her arm—the isolated gleam from a few laurel leaves, no more, of the sofa’s carved and gilded frame. It is clear that Goya was far less interested in the woman’s character, whatever its subtleties may have been, than in the opportunity her formal wardrobe gave him for tender, virtuoso color. By comparison, his portrait of their eldest son, Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga (c. 1790s), is thoroughly emblematic. The little boy, who was four at the time, is wearing a rich red silk jumpsuit with silvery-white sash and collar. He holds a string whose other end is tied to the leg of a pet magpie (the eclectic bird, noted for picking up things here and there, has Goya’s calling card in its beak, complete with a design of palette and brushes). Two cats are staring at the bird with fixated, murderous concentration, waiting for the boy’s attention to stray. Nearby on the floor is a cage full of finches, which the cats will presumably polish off as well if they get a chance. On one level this may be a lighthearted painting, but on others it is no such thing. It is another example of Goya’s awareness of how contingent life is: how at any moment, without warning, death can break into it, and it will be too late to save anything or anyone. Neither the magpie nor its noble young owner can relax. The price of privilege is unremitting tension, for birds as for people.

  Goya was moving up the social slope as a portraitist, and beyond the Altamiras were more exalted families. The one that would have the longest and deepest influence on him was that of the duke and duchess of Osuna. Goya met them around 1785. By that time he was really learning to enjoy success, as witness his acquisition of fine firearms to gratify his love of hunting—he even ordered a particularly good hunting weapon from a Madrid gunsmith as a present for his friend Zapater—as well as a high-performance carriage. Goya was not indifferent to the lure of hot wheels, and the two-wheeled birlocho he gave himself was the equivalent of today’s Ferrari or Lamborghini. There were only three others like it in the whole of Madrid, he boasted to Zapater.19 It was a one-horse “English carriage,” as light and maneuverable as you could imagine, “all gilded and varnished,” so that “even here people stop to watch it go by.” (Clearly, the prestige Spaniards attach to their forms of private transport has not changed in two hundred years.) But things went wrong. The seller took Goya out for a test drive, pulled by a horse “that I bought at the same time, already ten years old but with all the qualities it needed.” He offered to show the painter what the équipe could do; he took the reins and went charging down the middle of the road; he lost control, and “we all went end over end, birlocho, horse, and us. Thank God, we weren’t much injured.” Goya’s painting arm was hurt, but not broken or sprained. Wisely, he exchanged the sporty carriage for a more sedate landau, and the fiery horse for a pair of mules, explaining that since he was now on the public payroll it behooved him not to take risks with his life: a neat exercise in saving face.

  It was his passion for hunting that seems to have brought him together in 1786 with Pedro de Alcántara, marquis of Peñafiel, shortly to become the ninth duke of Osuna, and his wife, María Josefa Pimentel. Goya believed, perhaps correctly, that most aristocrats liked him better for his shooting skill than for his painting talent, and that he had a reputation among them “that few competent shots earn.”20 He did not mind this. When he said he would rather hunt than paint, he was not altogether joking. An earlier letter to Zapater shows Goya’s unconstrained love of the hunt:

  Friend, your last lines just killed me: you can’t imagine, when you mention hunting, how much I envy you. God won’t let me get away from here. For me, there’s no greater amusement in the world. I’ve been able to get away only once, and still nobody did better: 18 kills with 19 shots: that is 2 hares, a rabbit, 4 partridges, one old partridge, and 10 quail. The one I missed was a partridge. I got particular pleasure from this luck because I went out with two of the best guns [shots] in the place. I’ve earned a certain renown among the hunters who, I have to say, are particularly good shots.21

  Nowhere in his letters does Goya boast about his painting as he does about his hunting. He was a gentleman, and did not want to tempt fate.

  The Osunas welcomed him, as they welcomed so many of the outstanding writers, musicians, and ilustrados of their time, for his artistic talents alone. This wholly remarkable couple were to be his chief patrons, apart from the royal family itself, for several years; and more than anyone else they embodied the beau idéal of enlightened Spanish aristocracy.

  Married in 1771, the Osunas had four children by the time Goya entered their orbit. They were rich, educated, and passionately interested in whatever pertained to the arts and sciences. Theirs was not a fashionable dilettantism. The duke saw it as his serious duty to support the Madrid Economic Society and the Economic Societies of Friends of the Nation; he was a member of the Spanish Royal Academy and a friend of such leading ilustrados as Jovellanos, with whose plans for economic reform he was wholly in accord. Formerly a soldier and a diplomat, the duke had one of the great Spanish private libraries, some 25,000 volumes, particularly rich in English literature, which he planned to give to the nation—though unfortunately the government refused to let him do so, since it contained books proscribed by the Inquisition. The Osunas maintained a private theater, in which new plays were regularly performed; they were friends with Ramón de la Cruz (he of the sainetes) and the afrancesado playwright Leandro Moratín, translator of Shakespeare, Molière, and Voltaire’s Candide, and author of a famous lampoon against forced and arranged marriage, El sí de las niñas (“When the girls say yes”), which closely paralleled the lampoons on matrimonial injustice made by, among other ilustrados, Goya. They counted among their friends some of the best actors of the day, such as Isidoro Máiquez, a noted liberal and another afrancesado who would pay for his beliefs by being hounded out of Spain by the Inquisition; the Osunas helped support him in exile. Both the Osunas loved music, held concerts in their palace in Madrid and their country villa El Capricho about six miles outside the city, and owned a large collection of scores by composers both old and modern (including Haydn, Rossini, and Luigi Boccherini, who conducted orchestral performances for them in 1786 after the death of Don Luis, his previous patron).

  María Josefa de la Soledad Alonso-Pimentel y Téllez-Girón (1752-1834; this page), countess of Benavente, duchess of Osuna, related to half the grandest clans in Spain (Huéscars, Albas, and so on and on), was in every way as remarkable a person as her husband, and in some respects more so. She was one of the very few women who stood out from the general ruck of eighteenth-century Spanish aristocracy by virtue of her intelligence, not merely her wealth or breeding. Lady Holland, wife to the English ambassador at the court of Carlos IV and a woman whose social eye was never fooled, intensely respected her, calling her without qualification “the woman most distinguished for her talents, virtues and taste in all Madrid.”22 The duchess was one of the few women to play a major role in Spanish public life, through the Junta de Damas (Women’s Co
uncil) of the Madrid Economic Society. She had advanced and useful ideas on every public issue, from the state of women’s prisons (deplorable) to children’s education and the need for widespread vaccination, a recently developed medical technique that many Spanish doctors regarded as dangerous and perhaps anti-Christian, just as some right-wing loonies in America fifty years ago opposed putting fluoride in drinking water. Her home life crossed the border into public policy; her tertulias, or discussion evenings, drew the finest minds of the Spanish Enlightenment, such as Leandro Moratín. Ramón de la Cruz first produced a number of his sainetes in the private theater of her Madrid palace. She was patroness to Maíquez, the Kean or Gielgud of the time in Spain. Her social, political, and clerical connections were such that she was able, apparently without much difficulty, to get clearance from the Inquisition to create a large library of books proscribed by the Index, forbidden works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and others. She was, in short, the kind of person who, in our clichéclogged age, might restore the noble name of elitism: one of the great social-intellectual hostesses of Europe, a woman of enormously developed taste, sharp as a tack, wry in humor, and calmly dismissive of every sort of stupidity, superstition, and cant. Compared with María Josefa de la Soledad, the duchess of Alba was a much lesser creature, although her intellectual inferiority did nothing to diminish her fascination. But the two women had at least one thing in common. The biggest cultural fish in each one’s benign social net was Francisco de Goya, although their coup, at this early stage of Goya’s career, was not plainly apparent.