Goya, Los caprichos, plate 8, ¡Qué se la llevaron! (“They carried her off!”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 22 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.26)
The Caprichos, in sum, covered or at least alluded to a great range of topics, and their production was a huge effort. One need only consider the numbers involved. In those days impressions from etched plates were not numbered and individually signed, as (in the interest of quality control and the maintenance of rarity) they are today. But Goya printed about three hundred sets of the Caprichos, which meant making some twenty-four thousand impressions, not counting the imperfect pulls that had to be thrown out and the various trial proofs made on the way to a satisfactory biting, polishing, and inking of each plate. It was a taxing labor, even for a man with a full staff of assistants, and the results were disheartening. The publication of the Caprichos was announced on February 6, 1799, in an advertisement placed in the Diario de Madrid—Goya was unable to find regular bookshops to handle their sale. The price was one ounce of gold per set, or 320 reales—4 reales per print. And even at that low price, only twenty-seven sets were sold over the next four years. Four went to his loyal friends and clients the Osunas.
In business terms, this was a fiasco. There is no clear reason why it should have been. It has been suggested that the anti-clerical tone of some of the Caprichos incurred the wrath of the Inquisition, which in turn interfered with their sale; but there is no record of anything of the sort having happened. At least the Caprichos reached the market and the public, however feebly, while Goya was still alive. This did not happen with his other great graphic series, the Desastres de la guerra, whose plates were not printed until 1863, two generations after Goya’s death. If the Caprichos were a failure, the Desastres were not even that. And yet from them, eventually, came a triumph of which Goya was never to be aware.
While he was laboring on the Caprichos, however, Goya found time for a spectacular public project, one in which he was at last able to combine the spontaneity and brilliance of touch he had achieved in his painting with the expressive distortion and vast cast of characters that make up the dramatis personae of his etchings and earlier tapestry designs into one mighty virtuoso effort: the frescoes of the miracle of St. Anthony of Padua in the church of San Antonio de la Florida, on what were then the outskirts of Madrid. The San Antonio frescoes were Goya’s climactic feat of publicly accessible painting (since his work for the court had a very restricted public, and the Pinturas negras that would presently adorn his own house outside Madrid were not public at all but hermetically private, done for an audience of one, Goya himself). They are by far the most important frescoes Goya ever did, though one might feel less categorically certain about that if the Aula Dei murals, done some twenty-five years earlier, had survived without water damage and repainting so extensive that it amounted to replacement. In reality, though, it’s hard to imagine that the Aula Dei, even when pristine, could have rivaled his work at San Antonio de la Florida.
San Antonio stands where one of the city gates once was (they no longer exist). In Goya’s time the church was surrounded by woods and meadows at the edge of the royal park known as the Campo del Moro; today it abuts, more or less, Madrid’s largest railroad station. Quite small, and built in the form of a Greek cross with a cupola over the central intersection of its arms, it was sited on the bank of the Manzanares for the convenience of the customs officials who collected taxes and excise on incoming goods. These banes of the honest smuggler’s life needed a local chapel, and San Antonio, begun in 1792 during the reign of Carlos IV, served this purpose. Its architect, Filippo or Felipe Fontana—one of dozens of Italians imported by the Bourbons to work in Madrid—described himself as “architect, painter, and stage designer”: a jack-of-all-trades. (Little is known about him, but he was certainly no relative of either the great Carlo Fontana, author of Rome’s San Marcello in Corso, or the less eminent Domenico Fontana, mainly known for his legendary success in setting up the Vatican obelisk in the piazza in front of St. Peter’s in 1583.) Construction on San Antonio started in 1792 and finished, complete with Goya’s frescoes, in July 1799.
San Antonio was known as a pilgrimage church, a sister to the church of San Isidro, where the romerías, or pilgrimages, were held. It is not at all certain why the church should have been dedicated to a non-Spanish saint like Anthony of Padua, except that since his canonization in the thirteenth century his cult had spread far and wide outside its Italian origins. Nor do we know how Goya came by the commission. It may have been at the prompting of his friend Jovellanos, during the fairly brief period in the late 1790s when the latter was minister of justice, before he resigned or was dismissed from office under pressure of the Inquisition in August 1798. The archives of the Royal Palace contain only one document that bears directly on the paintings of San Antonio de la Florida, and the original is lost; it survives only as a copy.6 It is an invoice from a druggist and colorman for pigments supplied to Goya for the project: light and dark ocher, red earth, black earth, “flower of indigo,” green clay, “superfine London carmine,” and so on, together with sponges, pots, and badger-hair brushes, totaling some 8,000 reales. In addition there is an intriguing item: 6,240 reales for the hire of a carriage to take Goya from his home to the church and back again at 52 reales a day, “every day from August 1 to the completion of the work.” Since it is unlikely that Goya would have spent every day at the site for four months, he was almost certainly doing what artists and writers always do when they are given a travel allowance: padding it.
Certainly the commission came at a welcome time: Goya had been in serious financial doldrums since the dreadful illness with its attendant deafness brought him down in 1792, and he needed a big project to restore him to the public eye. Nevertheless, it cannot have been easy to take the task on. Goya’s vertigo had been so extreme in the early phases of his illness—he could scarcely walk upstairs and keep his balance when he was convalescing in Sebastián Martínez’s house in Andalucía—that he must have had many doubts and second thoughts about working on the scaffolding of a cupola thirty-three feet above the floor and almost twenty across. It would not have been as vertiginous as working on the coreto of El Pilar back in Zaragoza, but it must have been intimidating all the same. Did he have assistants? Apparently not; at least none are recorded—though one would suppose that he had workmen to apply the intonaco, the plaster coating on whose still-moist surface he would do the fresco painting. (Most of the pigment is classical buon fresco, although there are many passages, especially in the highlights, that Goya altered and retouched a secco, with fresh pigment, once the undercoat was dry.) There does exist from this time an undated portrait of his friend and sometime assistant, the Valencian artist Asensio Juliá, inscribed “Goya a su amigo Asensio,” in which this thoughtful-looking young man (who, because his father was a fisherman, bore the nickname El Pescadoret) is standing in what looks like a long dust coat in front of scaffolding that could very well be part of the setup for working inside San Antonio. Juliá is known to have copied Goya’s works several times, but could he have imitated his idiosyncratic and personal gestures of drawing well enough to have convincingly done any of the figures and faces on the scale of the cupola? It seems unlikely, but in any case is unprovable.
Goya, Asensio Juliá, 1798. Oil on canvas, 56 × 42 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. (illustration credit 6.27)
Goya, Milagro de San Antonio de Padua (The Miracle of St. Anthony of Padua), 1798. Fresco. Dome, Iglesia de San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid. (illustration credit 6.28)
Whether Goya had help or not, none of the strain of working high in the dome shows in the completed work—only a radiant and diaphanous joie de vivre. The frescoes of San Antonio, with their butterfly-winged and deliciously sexy angels, are young man’s art, created, in defiance of oncoming age, by a man past fifty.
The main scene of the narrative occupies the dome. It illustrates a legendary episode in the life of St. Anthony that appeared in C
hristian Year, a devotional narrative of the more fabulous moments in the lives of the saints that was compiled by a French priest and rendered into Spanish by Fr. José Isla. While in Padua, St. Anthony received news that his father, a Portuguese named Don Martín Bulloes, had been accused of murdering a man in Lisbon. With the permission of his religious superiors, Anthony flew (miraculously; he was “transported” in a flash) to Lisbon and asked the judges in the murder trial to produce the victim’s corpse. The saint then solemnly asked the dead man to state, before judges, witnesses, and his accused father, whether his father had killed the man. The corpse rose and spoke: no, he had not. It then sank back onto its coffin, amid general consternation and awe. Don Martín Bulloes was, naturally, acquitted.
The raising of the dead man is, of course, the core of the story on Goya’s cupola. But he did it in a way that, though it had origins in Italian art, had no precedents in Spain. It is still an open question whether Goya, on his visit to Italy, would have seen any of the cupola frescoes where painted spectators crowd a circular balustrade above the viewer’s head. And if he did, as is probable, we do not know which ones. No matter: Goya’s version of this device is entirely his own, both in narrative intensity and in down-homeness. To begin with, he took the usual Baroque layout—heaven and angels above, Earth and people below—and stood it on its head. Here, the cupola is the zone of Earth and people, and the angels in the pendentives and the intrados of the arches are holding it all up. He has not used a formal marble balustrade; what prevents the figures, some fifty of them, from toppling into our space below is a simple ring railing of wood, the posts perhaps of iron. Behind them are blue mountains, a tree or two, and the sky—we are outdoors, in a generic landscape, not a Portuguese courtroom. Goya has gone head-on against the Baroque esthetic, with its foam and flutter of angels, saints, putti, and other heavenly fauna in a celestial, indeterminate space. It seems that before getting to work on San Antonio de la Florida, Goya made a tour of Madrid churches with his friend Leandro Moratín, who briefly noted it in his journal: “With Goya at San Plácido. Looked at the paintings.”7 Presumably Goya wanted to bring himself up to date on what had and had not been done in terms of church ceiling painting by predecessors and rivals. Seeing their work must have confirmed his decision to steer clear of Baroque effects and go for the direct, realist look that was the hallmark of his style, especially after the Caprichos. Every one of these cupola figures could have been seen, and probably often was, on a Madrid street. They are real and direct; there is an architectural solidity in the folds and planes of their clothing that more than makes up for the complete absence of any depicted architecture. Some are physically attractive, others harshly caricatural, but none have the sweetness or elegance of comparable figures by, say, Tiepolo, and none represent anything beyond themselves, although they do display such a range of expression, reaction, gesture, and pose. Although they all look anchored to the plane above, they form a major and a minor climax, one diametrically opposite to the other across the dome.
On the north side, the major climax is, naturally, the miraculous raising of the dead witness by St. Anthony, who is standing on a rock so that his whole brown-robed body is visible from tonsured head to bare feet. With a gentle but imperious gesture, he summons up the corpse, stiff and gray-brown on its rude bier, its hands clasped in an angular gesture of prayer. A man props the awakened body into a sitting position. A woman flings out her arms in a gesture of amazement and supplication. Behind her, an old and seemingly blind man in a yellow tunic, supporting himself on a stick in his left hand, holds on to her shoulder with his right, as one might touch one’s daughter—and is she, perhaps, St. Anthony’s sister? For the old man is St. Anthony’s father, the accused, now vindicated. On the south side of the dome, directly across from this group, one sees a nameless ecstatic spreading his arms triumphantly to blurt out news of the miracle to those who have not noticed it.
From revelation to announcement, all around the circumference of the dome are dozens of other figures, an unbroken chain, each human link different in expression and action to the next, holding in common Goya’s consummate painterly shorthand and the subtle exaggeration of pose and grimace that makes each character “carry” across the distance from the dome to our eyes. Some appear quite unconcerned with the miracle—the children are ignoring it, intent on squirming and clambering around on the railing. Others are leaning over the railing, absorbed in looking at us on the church floor as we look up at them, like watchers on a street balcony. In the northeast quadrant, behind St. Anthony, a furtive figure in a yellow jacket and a dark hat pulled well down turns to scuttle away: this can only be the real murderer. All Madrid, you would think, is there, except for the majas and petimetres, whose visible presence is somewhat toned down, since it would have seemed too flashy or even indecent for a church. Their cloaks, shawls, and skirts are rendered in deep, sober colors—gray-mauves, browns, indigo blues—with occasional flashes of white, pink, pale jade-green, and hot orange. Goya’s color is uniquely his own. It doesn’t have the champagne liveliness of Tiepolo’s; indeed, it relies greatly on contrast with the sky of the cupola, which is as gray as lead.
This is a vernacular scene. You might almost be looking at a crowd in the bleachers of a bullring. And what gives it such unique vitality is the character of Goya’s gestural drawing. It is wonderfully tough and succinct. He wasted no time on grace notes that would not, in any case, have been visible from thirty feet below. A slash of black paint with a blob on the end defines an eyelid and a pupil; another slash, the shadow under a cheekbone or a mouth. Fabrics are as summarily and vividly rendered as a black suit or blue pelisse by Manet. The closer you look, the more modern the frescoes get. Once again one sees why Goya’s accumulated meaning for painters could only increase as the nineteenth century moved toward the twentieth. He was trying, as he once said to his son, Javier, of his general ambitions as a painter, to capture “the magic of the ambience.”8
Goya, Milagro de San Antonio de Padua (The Miracle of St. Anthony of Padua) (detail). Fresco. Dome, Iglesia de San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid. (illustration credit 6.29)
Nowhere is this magic more apparent, or more seductive, than in the figures of angels that occupy the lower zone of the church. Angels are traditionally sexless or, at most, display a sort of epicene, la-di-da masculinity that, when the angel in question is meant to be a warrior like Gabriel or Michael, looks fatuous. Not Goya’s; every last one of them is beyond doubt female. Indeed, they have the kind of flat-out femininity that one associates with Delacroix slave girls and Renoir popsies, except that the average Renoir is too sluglike to bear much comparison with Goya’s angels. What they really seem to be is young actresses in angelic drag. They float and flutter their rainbow wings like butterflies. They are, so to speak, generic but top-of-the-line angels; Goya was not interested in differentiating the theological niceties of angelic status, the archangels, thrones, dominations, cherubs, princes, powers, and so forth that figure in Creations and Last Judgments by other and earlier artists. Most of them are rubias, blondes, with rose-ivory skin and charming, if modestly clad, limbs. They draw back heavy curtains to frame and display the miracle happening in the dome. The curtains are shot silk, embroidered with traces of gold. The angels’ clothes—“vestments” is, if anything, too sacerdotal for these airborne babes—are ample and blow in the air: pink, green, gold, canary, white. The fabrics are beyond identification, but they seem both crisp and silky. Could there be any other work of art whose painter so visibly enjoyed painting its angels? Not in Spain, certainly.
Nothing is known about the reception that met the San Antonio frescoes when the church opened to the public in 1799. Later accounts tend toward a purse-mouthed reservation: the frescoes are, if not exactly pagan, then certainly more secular in spirit than they ought to be for a church. A critic named Pedro de Madrazo complained in 1880 that “the miracle performed by the saint is treated as lightheartedly as if it were the performance of a tr
oupe of strolling acrobats, while the androgynous angels have flashing eyes and camellia-hued skin that would better become the beauty of a harlot than that of a celestial being.”9 A fine example of how Goya’s more prurient critics could manage to get the point and completely miss it, both at once.
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