Goya, Madrid Album, 84, San Fernando ¡cómo hilan! (“The San Fernando workhouse: How they spin!”), 1796–97. Private collection. (illustration credit 7.9)
After Carlos IV was crowned king in 1788, Godoy’s career took off like one of the hot-air balloons that were the wonder of public gatherings in Madrid. It would be tedious to list the favors, honors, emoluments, and promotions that were showered on him over the next few years, beginning (in 1792) with the dukedom of Alcudia, which made him much more than a peripheral noble: he was now a grandee of the first class, with income from his estates to match. He was raised to field marshal, and received into the Order of Santiago. At the end of 1792, aged only twenty-five, Godoy was prime minister, and then the “universal minister” of Spain and the Indies. By 1793, his official combined income from military and political sources totaled more than 800,000 reales, and he received more than a million reales annually from Crown estates that had been given over to him. In picturing what many Spaniards thought of Godoy’s career, Lord Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had it right when he wrote of his emblematic Spaniard, “the lusty muleteer,” who
chants “Viva el Rey!”
And checks his song to execrate Godoy,
The royal wittol Charles, and curse the day
When first Spain’s queen beheld the black-eyed boy,
And gore-faced Treason sprang from her adulterate joy.
We cannot know if Carlos knew of María Luisa’s affair with Godoy—if, indeed, it existed. At the very least, however, it is quite clear that the three of them formed a triangle, and were visibly attached to one another; no fit of royal jealousy disturbed the relationship. Carlos was content to let Godoy do his political and military thinking for him. In this, he was weak and lazy, but not altogether stupid, since he wanted to free himself from his father’s advisers; he could be safe from the pull of bitterly competing court factions by having as chief minister a man who owed his position solely to him. María Luisa was completely under Godoy’s spell: she wrote to him several times a week, often in terms of gushing devotion—“Your memory and fame will come to an end,” she exclaimed in a not untypical letter of 1804, “only when the world itself is destroyed.” Her son the infante Don Francisco de Paula was said to look very like Godoy. They would stay together, king, queen, and favorite, even after Napoleon forced them all into exile.
Goya, María Luisa Mounted on Marcial, 1799. Oil on canvas, 338 × 282 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.10)
One might suppose that a woman who could run a country through her favorite, and get her husband to do whatever she said, would have the looks and brains of Cleopatra. But such was not the case. María Luisa was warmhearted, spirited, and willful, but she was never a beauty—although she was so proud of her arms that she forbade the wearing of elbow-length gloves at court, so that anyone could see how inferior other women’s arms were to hers. Her looks fell victim to the cosmetic and medical inadequacies of the age. She wore ill-fitting dentures, having lost all her teeth by her mid-thirties, and her skin acquired a disagreeably sallow tone. She was realistic about this, at least with friends. Regarding her son Fernando, whom she loathed, she wrote to Lady Holland: “You will find [him] ugly; he is the counterpart of myself.”8 But regal she remained, and Goya did a magnificent job of conveying this without resorting to unctuous flattery. In his 1799 portrait of her, mounted with an erect but relaxed carriage on her favorite horse, Marcial, he gives her an almost quizzical half-smile, the brown, frank eyes looking down at you in complete security. She was forty-eight by then, and some years before her fertility, of which there was no question, had deprived her of her figure.
María Luisa had never shirked her chief dynastic duty, the production of royal heirs; after her death, Godoy’s longtime mistress Pepita Tudo reckoned that the queen had been with child no fewer than twenty-four times, including a number of miscarriages and stillbirths. It was a crushing gynecological burden to bear. Only seven of her children survived infancy, and of those several did not live beyond childhood. Unfortunately, her eldest surviving son, Fernando, prince of Asturias, was one of those who did, and he grew up detesting her: he, at least, had no doubts as to the position Godoy had in her heart as well as in the power structure of Spain. Moreover, he had been largely ignored by his parents, and since neither the king nor the queen put much of a premium on book learning, his education had been stunted. What there was of it he had from priests, under the charge of a nasty and Machiavellian canon named Juan de Escóiquiz. From him Fernando received an early grounding in the arts of lying, intrigue, and conspiracy, ideal for his maturation as the future Fernando VII, most suspicious and conservative of rulers. Escóiquiz loathed Godoy as a cheat and a voluptuary whose house was defiled by open prostitution, orgies, and adulteries that took place “in exchange for pensions, sinecures, and honors.” He had debauched “the flower of Spanish women, from the highest classes to the lowest.”9 There was nothing so bad that it couldn’t be said about Godoy or believed by the young prince of Asturias. His first deep political emotion would be his hatred of the royal favorite, whose presence menaced his entire sense of self. Moreover, Fernando’s deepest fears of maternal rejection were quite well-founded. She despised her graceless poltroon of a son, and made no secret of it. All in all, few states can ever have been ruled by such a parodically dysfunctional family as this generation of the Spanish Bourbons.
Godoy wielded great power, but his own position was never inherently secure. He owed it all to the favor and patronage of the king and queen, which could be withdrawn at any time. He could never confidently rely on those for whom he had done favors, because the recipients could so easily be ingrates. Patronage bestowed on one makes enemies and malcontents of others.
But there was a more specific political problem for Godoy, and the house of Bourbon, as well. It was the French Revolution, the “marvelous event” that threatened all the thrones of Europe and reached a terrifying climax with the beheading of Carlos IV’s cousin Louis XVI.
Clearly, it would have been foolish and perhaps politically suicidal for Spain to send troops into France to prop up Louis’s tottering regime: the tide of revolutionary enthusiasm was running too strong, the Spanish army was too weak. But the count of Floridablanca, the cunning and increasingly reactionary chief minister whom Carlos had inherited from his father, resolved to keep the Spanish people as ignorant as possible of what catastrophes were brewing in France. He was an old ilustrado, but above all he was a Spaniard, and the enlightened ideas he had tolerated as Carlos III’s chief minister were not so tolerable in these threatening times. Floridablanca therefore clamped down a strict censorship on news about France crossing the Pyrenees or entering Spanish ports. Journals were censored or banned outright, and the Inquisition was given free rein to track down leaks. Spain must not find out that its neighbor had rejected royal authority. Eminent ilustrados like the conde de Campomanes and the liberal polymath Gaspar de Jovellanos, whom Campomanes had promoted to councilor of state, found themselves retired in 1791; Jovellanos was exiled to his native Asturias. Of course, this absurd attempt at containment had no hope of success, but it threw Carlos IV’s government into confusion.
The king now turned to the man who most disliked Floridablanca and yet, in many ways, closely resembled him: Pedro Pablo, conde de Aranda. Like Floridablanca, Aranda was a strong believer in “enlightened despotism” and yet an economic and fiscal reformer; he had the advantage, however, of knowing France at first hand, being a friend of Voltaire’s and, in his capacity as Carlos III’s ambassador to France, getting acquainted with Benjamin Franklin and John Jay. He therefore had a more sophisticated grasp of republican impulses than most Spaniards of his time and class, but this did not help him much after he replaced Floridablanca as secretary of state in 1792. Aranda did not last long either. The French republicans overthrew Louis XVI that summer, and declared France to be a republic. Aranda’s francophile sympathies (such as his Freemasonry
) now counted badly against him in Carlos’s eyes. The Church hated Freemasons, and vice versa. Freemasonry was part of the apparatus of revolution in France, as it had been in America, where a large proportion of the Founding Fathers belonged to lodges. It therefore seemed that Aranda was bound to side with the French revolutionaries while carrying out the impossible, contradictory task of supporting the interests of his own sovereign. This gave Godoy the opportunity to persuade Carlos to dismiss Aranda and replace him as chief minister with—Godoy himself. Aranda had been too freehanded in his attacks on Godoy’s youth and inexperience. “It is true,” Godoy replied in his own defense, “that I am only twenty-six years old, but I work fourteen hours a day, something that no one else has done; I sleep four, and apart from taking my meals, I never fail to look after everything that comes my way.”10 Godoy was no military genius, but as the unfolding of his career abundantly confirms, his faults were overconfidence and lack of field experience, not laziness.
So his appointment as chief minister may not have been such an abysmal act of nepotistic folly as Godoy’s many detractors, down to this day, have made out. Spain was not rich in candidates for the job, and other high-placed Spaniards could well have done worse than Godoy—though this is not saying much. His first confrontation with the newly republican French was moderately successful. It took place in 1793–95, immediately after the guillotining of Louis XVI. Carlos IV, being a Bourbon like the late Louis, had immediately laid claim to the French throne—a striking combination of folly and naïveté. The French response was to declare war on Spain. The French armies advanced into the northwest and northeast corners of Spain: the Basque country and, more important, the Mediterranean coastal area of Figueras in Cataluña. Without being able to claim full victory, the Spanish army brought them to a standstill—one of the few times the normally fractious and independent-minded Catalans united with Madrid against a threat from across the Pyrenees—and though the war itself was inconclusive, it ended in a negotiated settlement, the Treaty of Basel, in 1795. For his role in brokering it, Godoy was endowed with the resonant title of El Príncipe de la Paz, the “Prince of the Peace.”
This was the high-tide mark of Godoy’s popularity in Spain. It did not last. The upper nobility continued to regard him as a scheming upstart whose road to power ran between María Luisa’s sheets. The clergy continued to loathe him, not only because of his much-exaggerated immorality, but for his desire to curb their wealth and power.
There was, however, one area in which Godoy’s achievement—or at least the brightness of his reflected glory—cannot be gainsaid. This was his taste in art: specifically, his appetite for paintings by the resident genius of Carlos’s court, Francisco Goya. By the end of the century, the royal couple’s demand for Goya portraits of themselves was tapering off. He had done them full-length and half-length, standing on their own two feet and seated on horseback, and surrounded by their relatives in that resplendent group portrait The Family of Carlos IV. Presumably the king felt that enough was enough. Nor were there remarkable affairs of state, diplomatic triumphs, or set-piece battles to be commemorated, as Velázquez had done with the surrender at Breda. Godoy became the most consistent and enthusiastic client Goya had in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The artist bragged about this in a letter to his old friend Martín Zapater. The chief minister, Goya said, had taken him for an outing in his coach, showered him with compliments, and uttered “the greatest possible expressions of friendship.” And it could hardly be said that, in working for Godoy, Goya was stepping far outside the aura of the First Family.
Goya, La maja desnuda (The Naked Maja), c. 1797–1800. Oil on canvas, 97 × 190 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.11)
Godoy already owned a considerable collection, whose chief treasure was the greatest nude ever painted by a Spaniard: Velázquez’s Venus and Cupid (c. 1650), now known as the “Rokeby Venus,” a present from the duchess of Alba. (This was a magnificent gift, but it says little for the duchess’s connoisseurship: how could anyone with half an eye bring herself to part willingly with such a painting?) Godoy also possessed a pair of nudes of more immediate contemporary interest, painted for him by Goya: La maja desnuda (The Naked Maja, c. 1797–1800) and its more proper sister, La maja vestida (The Clothed Maja, c. 1805). Neither was dated by Goya, but The Naked Maja was seen in Godoy’s collection by a visitor late in 1800—who, moreover, made no references to its clothed version, as anyone who saw them in the same place would certainly have done.
Goya, La maja vestida (The Clothed Maja), c. 1805. Oil on canvas, 97 × 190 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.12)
These paintings, especially when considered as a pair, are extraordinarily famous, but very little is actually known about them—starting with the sitter’s name. One thing seems certain: whoever the lady may have been, she was definitely not the duchess of Alba—and does not look like the duchess in other portraits of Goya’s, despite her black ringlets, by then a fairly generic attribute of female beauty. The duchess of Alba died young, in July 1802, having only just turned forty; the cause of her death seems to have been a combination of dengue (breakbone) fever and tuberculosis, and it seems impossible that a thirty-eight-year-old woman already suffering from two such wasting diseases would have looked as delectable as the girl in Goya’s picture, with her smoothly rounded thighs and heavy, almost implausibly perky breasts. Goya did not paint her to commemorate his own affair with her. This is one of the many gaps in our knowledge of Goya’s life that legend and tall stories have hastened to fill. It is more likely that she was one of Godoy’s own mistresses, a fairly numerous tribe whose names have mostly been lost. Most probably she was the great love of Godoy’s life, a spectacularly pretty and sexy Málagan girl named Pepita Tudo. The two could not live together under the same roof—that would have been too much for the proprieties of Madrid society, since Godoy was aleady married to a young countess, the condesa de Chinchón, handpicked for him by no less a person than Queen María Luisa—but Godoy never ceased to love Pepita, or she him, and thirty years after he went into exile with his royal patrons, the death of his wife at last freed him to marry Pepita—which he immediately did. Occasionally she would be invited to dinners in his palace, where she would sit on one side of him, the condesa de Chinchón on the other. This was taken as fairly normal by the guests, with a few exceptions, one of whom was Jovellanos. For an ilustrado Jovellanos was sniffily prudish and small-minded, so much so that he felt obliged to leave the table—a silly and politically naïve gesture if ever there was one.
It is plausible, even likely, that Godoy commissioned two portraits of Pepita from Goya, one naked in or about 1797 and the later version, clothed, some eight years later. This would help explain a peculiar feature of The Naked Maja: her head doesn’t fit well on her body, an awkwardness of drawing that one does not expect from Goya’s superbly fluent hand. It is someone else’s head. Presumably what happened was that, having reluctantly married the condesa de Chinchón on royal orders—“Few souls have been as sad and apathetic as hers,” Godoy wrote to María Luisa—he realized he could not have a recognizable picture of his mistress, naked or clothed, in any part of the palace, however private. He therefore directed Goya to replace Pepita’s head with a generic one in both versions, and something went awry in the transfer. This hypothesis could perhaps be tested by X-raying the picture, which has not been done.
Due to the repressive influence of Spanish Catholicism, there are few nudes in the history of Spanish art before, at the earliest, the mid-nineteenth century. It was not considered a respectable genre, and it says much about Spanish attitudes toward the nude that Goya, in his old age, should have been investigated by the Inquisition for painting The Naked Maja. The inquiry went nowhere, but an air of salacity seems to have clung to the picture ever since it left his easel. As well it might: compared with the classical and idealized nudes of the Renaissance, this is a sexy and straightforward girl, and
her level gaze, which both entices and sizes up the (male) viewer, has filled more than one art critic—and, presumably, many more than one visitor to the Prado—with feelings of inadequacy verging on alarm. It is, in effect, a Spanish Olympia, and it rouses the same kind of feelings that are provoked by Manet’s great painting in all its sharp and independent sexuality. The Naked Maja is defiantly herself, alluring certainly, but decidedly on her terms. She is not a sweet little thing, a passive and receptive appeal to male fantasy, like almost any other eighteenth-century nude you might care to name. Even without her clothes (or perhaps especially so), she is a real maja, tough, sharp, and not to be pushed around. The art historian Fred Licht was quite right to point out that when you are looking at her, a phrase sung by Marlene Dietrich comes to mind: “Ich kann halt lieben nur und sonst gar nichts,” “I only know how to love, nothing more.” In effect, Licht adds, “Goya’s Maja is the perfect prototype of a peculiarly modern woman who, more than a century later, will be represented by the protagonist of The Blue Angel.…Goya divorces sexuality from love.”11 It may be that Licht takes this a little too far; one may not agree that The Naked Maja is a sort of implacable, devouring sex machine, “dissociated from pleasure, consolation, fecundity, and tenderness,” who demands man’s “submission to an inscrutable and possibly menacing force of nature.”12
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