By then, Carlos IV was forty years old. He was candid, stolid, and pious to the point of superstition, attending Mass at least once and often several times a day. He had ample experience of others’ deference, but little of exercising direct power. He was deficient in both statecraft and cunning, and had little natural talent for acquiring either. He vacillated between advisers, delegated too much authority to others, and spent too much of his time under the thumb of his wife.
A simple soul, Carlos had been something of an athlete in his youth—fencing, boxing—but now found his main pleasure in the hunt. As a rule he hunted on foot, with dogs—a passion for the chase that was also felt by Goya, and probably helped to cement his position as painter-in-chief to the court. “As far as I’m concerned there is no better entertainment in all the world,” he wrote to his friend Zapater about hunting. It is not known whether Goya hunted with his monarch, but he certainly did with his younger brother, the Infante Don Luis de Borbón. The first such excursion was at Don Luis’s country lodge at Arenas de San Pedro, southwest of Madrid, in the fall of 1783, the year Goya completed the portrait of the infante with his family—an immature foretaste of the great group portrait of Carlos IV and his family that Goya would execute in 1800. “I went out hunting twice with His Highness, who is a very good shot,” he wrote to Zapater, “and on the last afternoon he said after I had brought down a rabbit, ‘This rotten dauber is even more passionate about hunting than I am!’ ”1
But Goya hunted only occasionally, since he had work to do. Hunting, by the king’s own account, took up nearly all the royal day, leaving little time for affairs of state. “Every day without fail,” he told Napoleon over a meal in Bayonne after his exile from Madrid, “in winter and summer, I went hunting until noon; I ate, and immediately returned to the hunting field until evening. Manuel [Godoy, the prime minister] kept me informed about affairs, and I went to bed only to begin again in the same way the next day.” (It is not hard to imagine what contempt the fiercely concentrated Napoleon would have felt for this confession of such an empty, lackadaisical life.) Carlos IV did not care what he shot. If it ran or flew, it was fair game. He even ordered that animal carcasses were not to be buried on the royal grounds: they must be left to rot in the open air, thereby attracting crows, which His Majesty also liked to shoot.
Goya painted both Carlos IV and his father in hunting dress. He did so in homage to Velazquez’s royal portrait of Felipe IV on the hunting field, which he had ample opportunity to study in his role of official painter, with access to the palace. In the 1630s, Velázquez had produced several gun-and-dog hunting portraits of members of the royal family for their hunting lodge at the Torre de la Parada outside Madrid; his image of Felipe as huntsman is quite informal, without the obvious marks of kingly status. Goya took up this cue first in his c. 1780 portrait of the aging Carlos III with his flintlock and his hunting dog curled up at his feet, standing in a luminous and open landscape. His big-nosed face, framed in the tricorne hat like the head of an affable turtle poking from its shell, looks as contented as his dog’s. A benign king, whose only obvious attribute of kingship is the broad watered-silk sash of the order he founded (the Order of Carlos III) that runs diagonally across his chest. This is part of a different image of monarchy that Carlos III, in his (relative) liberalism, apparently wished to promote and be recognized by: not the remote and austere monarch far above his subjects, not the armored military hero surrounded by the attributes of command, but a man whose amiable pleasure in country pursuits linked him, by implication, to the Spanish people—a people to whose reform and improvement he felt a royal obligation.
The same feeling is present in Goya’s portrait of the son, Carlos IV, done in 1799. The character of the paint has improved by now, of course; it no longer has the stiffness it had in Goya’s youth but bathes its unpromising subject in a flicker and flow of light whose freedom the painter had had twenty years to perfect. Goya has endowed him with a portly dignity, if not with any flattering signs of intelligence. As in his father’s earlier portrait, Carlos IV wears the blue, white, and blue sash of the Order of Carlos III, and Goya has lavished a great deal of care on his clothes and accoutrements: the faceted silver gleam of his belt buckle, the curious fabric, brown with ocher spots, of his jacket. He looks just like the man he should have been: a pink-faced country squire, adored by his dog, perfectly content with his sport and with himself. It is, in some ways, the most “English” of all Goya’s royal portraits. The Englishness, one may surmise, is a real influence and not an accident. Goya would have seen English prints in the Cádiz home of his friend Sebastián Martínez when he was recovering from the illness that struck him down in 1793, and the work of Reynolds and Gainsborough, though filtered through the reproductory process of engraving, must have impressed him quite directly. This portrait also pays homage to earlier sources—for instance, the Prado’s Titian portrait of Emperor Charles V and his hunting dog, which is obsequiously sniffing at his crotch, as dogs do. Carlos IV’s dog, a golden or Labrador retriever (it is hard to be precise about related breeds so far back in time), is doing the same thing. It is not apparent in reproduction, but it is visible in the painting itself, that the dog’s collar bears an inscription half hidden by its floppy ear: it reads, or seems to read, G-OY-, though the G is indistinct. Goya: the court painter declaring himself, perhaps not without irony, as his master’s faithful hound. Or just possibly, Godoy, the name of the prime minister (though this seems less likely, since Godoy was the most powerful man in the realm next to the king, and perhaps the lover of Queen María Luisa; he would not have taken kindly to seeing himself identified as a dog, however faithful to his monarchical owner).
Goya, Carlos IV in Hunting Clothes, 1799. Oil on canvas, 210 × 130 cm. Palacio Real, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.1)
Clock in the Casparini room, Palacio Real, Madrid (illustration credit 5.2)
When he was not hunting, Carlos IV read lightly (though more than his detractors said, mainly in constitutional law) and enjoyed an undemanding level of hobbyism. Like his father, he disapproved of popular theater and did nothing to encourage it. (The ilustrados’ hostility to the street culture of plebeian Spain, including bullfighting, and their lofty assumption that what the populacho needed was more elevating stuff, was one of the serious class rifts at the turn of the century; Carlos IV did not, however, perceive that it was a source of popular resentment.) Oddly, he practiced plumbing, though it is unlikely that he would have delved into the fecal mysteries of the palace water closets. He was a fair amateur carpenter (this being a time when wood-turning on small, elegantly constructed lathes was not an uncommon gentleman’s diversion) and a moderately competent watercolorist. He also possessed a large collection of clocks and watches, which he purchased from agents all over Europe and which are preserved today in the collections of the Palacio Real in Madrid. Some of these—like the multi-movement, elaborated, almost ten-foot-tall clock, showing the time on earth, the phases of the moon, the motions of the planets, and the seasons, that stands in the salon where his portraits in formal and hunting dress by Goya now hang—are of the utmost magnificence. Some of the smaller ones in his possession he loved to take apart, adjust, synchronize, and reassemble—a never-ending activity that helped pass the time on days when the weather was too bad for hunting. When he traveled, he took along some timepieces and a kit of watchmaker’s tools. No doubt if there had been trains in those days, he would have had a model-train layout in the basement. He must have loved his guns, and known all about them: his connoisseurship of those beautifully crafted flintlocks, with their damascened, brown-blued, and silver-inlaid barrels, engraved locks, and Circassian walnut stocks, exquisitely oiled and polished, must some of the time have made him a pleasure to talk to, whatever he may or may not have known about the family Velázquez portraits.
Unlike his father, Carlos IV genuinely loved music. He played the violin, though not well: his tempi were erratic, which made life difficult for other membe
rs of the string quartet he liked to practice with. Once, when rehearsing a piece, an Italian fellow musician made so bold as to tell the king that he should rest for three bars so that the others could catch up. Carlos felt this was impertinent and said so, though without rancor. “Kings,” he observed, “need never wait for anyone.”
The one area of culture in which Carlos IV achieved real distinction was his patronage of the visual arts, not just the arts of the horologist and gunsmith. Even if he had done nothing else for the art of painting, the fact that he retained Goya as primer pintor del rey, “first painter to the king,” and contributed to his support until 1808, when the royal family was forced to flee Spain, would have been more than enough to earn posterity’s gratitude. He supported other painters, too, but more as adjuncts to his architectural schemes. Decorously, Goya refrained from writing down his opinions of his king in any of his letters—and of course he kept no diary.
Carlos had a passion for architecture and understood its language well. His tastes were refined, modern, and French, running in the direction of Neoclassicism; in this he was well served by his court architect, Juan de Villanueva, best known as the designer of the Academy of Sciences, 1787, which was later converted to the Museo del Prado.
But Carlos also reached out to France when he felt so inclined, and in one of the pavilions by Villanueva that embellished the grounds of the royal palace at Aranjuez he commissioned one of the most exquisitely decorated rooms in all Spain, the Gabinete del Platino, or “Platinum Cabinet” (1805), designed by those masters of the Empire style Percier and Fontaine. Carlos liked Neoclassicism and adopted the style for Villanueva’s expansion and redecoration of his pavilion at the Pardo, the Casita del Príncipe, as well as for new work in the Escorial.
He retained advisers and agents in Paris, Naples, and Rome. He kept the decorative-arts factories instituted by his father running, particularly the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara, which turned out hangings based on Goya’s designs—somewhat to the periodic irritation of Goya himself, who wanted to break free of the relatively humble work of decorative tapestry production.
Percier and Fontaine, Salón de Platino, Aranjuez Casita del Labrador, Madrid (illustration credit 5.3)
That Goya was unhappy about not getting more elevated and prestigious work is indicated by a letter to Zapater: “Today I went to see the king and he received me very happily.… He took my hand and he started playing the violin. I went in fear, because there has been someone of my profession who told him in the same room that I didn’t want to serve him, and other things that vile men do.”2 There was, of course, truth in this court backbiting. Carlos IV had wanted tapestry designs from Goya, of a “rustic and comic” nature, to ornament the walls of the royal offices in the Escorial. At first Goya jibbed at this, but he had to give in. In a contrite letter to Bayeu he apologized for the arrogant-seeming tone he had used in complaint.3 There is not much difference between the new cartoons and the older ones he had executed for Carlos III—except that a note of satire has made its appearance, like the first faint entry of a theme in an orchestral piece. The Goya of the earlier tapestries was not a mocker. But in a tapestry cartoon like The Wedding (1791–92; this page), one sees the beginnings of what will, by the end of the decade, turn into the vast and corrosive skepticism of his Caprichos, which sketch, among other things, the lineaments of a society in which everything from love and social status to clerical absolution from sin is up for sale.
Meanwhile, he had the Osunas to think of, and other clients as well. For the Osunas, Goya in 1797–98 produced a group of witchcraft paintings—a titillating subject for ilustrados. The duchess, rather as one might display a faux-naïve or campy taste for horror movies without actually believing in reincarnated mummies or creatures from the black lagoon, fancied them considerably. Brujería—scenes of witchcraft—were very much a fixture of popular culture in late-eighteenth-century Spain. You didn’t have to believe in devils, but their presence on your horizon offered a certain frisson to the enlightened mind, even if only as emblems of superstitions you had transcended. For the faithful, of course, there was no question about it. Witches were as real as cats (and often masqueraded as such), and the person who denied the real, actual existence of the devil and his legions was asking for nasty posthumous surprises. If one is to believe his letters, Goya did not believe in witches. He described himself to similarly enlightened friends as a skeptic, and there is no reason to doubt that he was. “Ya, ya, ya,” he wrote to Zapater, “I’m not afraid of witches, hobgoblins, apparitions, boastful giants, knaves, or varlets, et cetera, nor indeed of any kind of beings except human beings.”4 But not being afraid of them did not mean ignoring them: witches, warlocks, and other things that went bump in the night were too powerful as folklore for a painter like Goya, who was fascinated by culture that came out of the pueblo, to ignore.
Moreover, there was a matter of fashion. Goya was not the only artist or writer to be intrigued by the grotesque and the macabre. Other people in his circle of Madrid acquaintances knew about, and were titillated by, the fashion for the Gothick, for gratuitous shocks and horrors. The English Whig nobleman Lord Holland, for instance, kept Gaspar de Jovellanos au fait with English literary fashions, like the novels of Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Horace Walpole’s gothic romance set in the Middle Ages, The Castle of Otranto (1764). The taste for ruins, hauntings, diabolic transactions, and magic spread quite rapidly to the sophisticates of Goya’s set. Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796), whose contorted plot revolves around the doings of a fiendish madrileña named Matilda who corrupts an entire monastery full of Capuchins in Madrid, was presented to Jovellanos by Lord Holland; Lewis’s play The Castle Spectre (1797) was translated into Spanish as El duque de Visco and performed, apparently in a somewhat bowdlerized form, in Madrid in 1803. Plays about diabolism and witchcraft were a staple of the popular Spanish theater in Goya’s time, and the duquesa de Osuna was partial to them. Thus she commissioned a number of small paintings on witchcraft, diabolism, and sorcery from Goya in the late 1790s. Two have perished or been lost, surviving only as indistinct photographs—a scene in a witches’ kitchen, and an encounter between Don Juan and the avenging commendatore he has murdered, entitled The Stone Guest. The latter comes from a scene in a play by Antonio Zamora, one of the many reworkings of the Don Giovanni legend. Another of the plays by this all-but-forgotten Spanish playwright supplied the motif for a second piece of Goya diablerie, which has in the foreground, written on what is presumably a prompt sheet, the fractured words LAM[PARA] DESCO[MUNAL], “monstrous lamp.” This, Juliet Wilson-Bareau points out, is a fragment of a line uttered by a dimwitted and superstitious priest in a play called The Forcibly Bewitched, who believes a spell has been cast on him and that his soul is now being drained away:5
Monstrous lamp
Whose vile light
As though I were a wick
Sucks up my life’s oil.
A demon with ram’s horns obsequiously holds out to him a lamp, whose flame he feeds with oil from a tin cruet.
Goya, A Scene from “The Forcibly Bewitched,” c. 1790s. Oil on canvas, 42.5 × 30.8 cm. The National Gallery, London. (illustration credit 5.4)
But can a picture like this, even by so distinguished an artist, be taken with the seriousness one would give to Goya’s other work of the late 1790s? Surely not: it’s an overwrought joke, with the priest about to vomit as he pours forth the oil or chrism of damnation—the sort of joke that a man who has largely escaped the bonds of superstition might make about the fantasy to another wised-up person. Not for a moment are we likely to feel the deep and authentic terrors emitted by some of the Desastres de la guerra, or for that matter some of the witchcraft scenes in the Caprichos. Broadly speaking, the same is true of other witchcraft paintings in the same series.
Two of these concern the propitiatory sacrifice of babies and fetuses supposedly made by witches to Satan. It was natural, perhaps in
evitable, that a pre-scientific culture with an enormously high infant mortality rate through disease, infection, and poor nutrition would favor the production of myths about ritual child-murder by agents of the Evil One. Just as God and the Virgin were believed to watch over the healthy child, so Satan and his agents were always ready to pounce on the sickly one, to drain its vitality, suck its blood, and reduce it to skin and bones.
Like many, perhaps most, Spanish parents of the time, Goya and his wife, Josefa Bayeu, had long and painful experience of premature child-death. Josefa miscarried frequently, and of the seven children they had who lived long enough even to receive the sacrament of baptism, only one (their son Javier) survived beyond childhood. The image of the witch as child snatcher was therefore an extremely powerful one, not only for ordinary uneducated folk but for relatively elite people like Goya and his wife—and, one may guess, even for an ilustrada noblewoman such as the duchess of Osuna. Be that as it may, The Witches’ Sabbath and The Spell (both 1797–98) place an obsessive emphasis on the abduction, torture, and sacrificial murder of infants.
In The Witches’ Sabbath, the witches have gathered to receive their orders from and pay homage to the devil, in the form of an enormous cabrón, or billy goat, with curving horns like a lyre woven with oak leaves. One crone holds up an emaciated infant, who seems barely alive. A younger and relatively pretty witch, to her right, gazes raptly at Satan as she cradles her capture—a newly seized infant, fairly plump and in much better condition—in her arms: a parody of the Madonna and Child. The gray corpse of a starveling child lies on the ground to the left, and above it a half-naked crone holds up what looks like the kind of stick on which hunters strung their prey—except that these are not rabbits but a trio of dead fetuses. Satan extends his foreleg in a gesture of encouragement to the pretty witch with the plump baby, as if to say: this is the kind of sacrifice I want. The usual Gothick appurtenances of dread—bats and owls—flitter in the sky, and there is, of course, a horned moon.
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