Goya
Page 33
Goya’s other depictions of an important military figure on the Spanish side were his portraits of Arthur Wellesley, future duke of Wellington. They stem from an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful head of Wellington done in pencil and sanguine, probably meant as the design for a print to be engraved by someone else.10 It was originally thought, from the testimony of Goya’s grandson Mariano Goya, to have been made from the life in a nearby town after Wellington’s victory in the battle of Salamanca (July 22, 1812). This is unlikely for a number of reasons: how would Goya, now sixty-six, have got to the front, and why would Wellington, after so long and exhausting a battle and with so much administrative work to be mopped up, have granted a sitting to an artist he did not know? The more plausible date is somewhat later—after the English Caesar entered Madrid in triumph, to be met by an ecstatic, half-starved citizenry delirious with gratitude, that August.
The drawing is a small masterpiece of insight. Wellington’s face shows that he has beaten back the strain of battle, but at cost. The skin is stretched tight over the bony face of that grand diable de milord anglais, the mouth is resolute but tired, and the eyes have the “thousand-yard stare” of a man who has been among the cannon. It is very far from the conventional rhetoric with which artists (including Goya, sometimes) were apt to portray victorious warriors. Very probably, Goya meant it to be the basis of a portrait etching of Wellington, which—he could well have hoped—would have sold well to Spaniards in Madrid in the aftermath of victory. But this was not to be. After Wellington left Madrid, the French counterattacked (on November 2) and reoccupied the capital. They were driven out by the English on November 6, but installed themselves again on December 2, not to be finally expelled until late May 1813. There would have been no prospect of publishing or selling such a print under a renewed French occupation, and so the engraving was never done.
Goya, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, c. 1812. Red chalk drawing over graphite, 23.5 × 17.7 cm. The British Museum, London. (illustration credit 8.10)
Goya, Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, 1812. Oil on canvas. Apsley House, London. (illustration credit 8.11)
The drawing became the basis for the head of a huge but very inferior painting of the Duke of Wellington on horseback. This picture rarely appears in books on Goya, and for a sound reason: it is a wreck, in such bad condition as to be almost illegible. Moreover, it seems to have been painted on a reused canvas whose horse may originally have supported the corpulent frame of Godoy, although that is far from certain; it was more probably an abandoned portrait of the French intruder-king José I on horseback, scraped back and reused by Goya because of the shortage of canvas. By the late spring of 1813 poor Joseph Bonaparte was, in any case, out of the picture; the defeat of his forces at the battle of Vitoria (June 21) ended in the complete triumph of the English and a veritable orgy of looting. Wellington’s 15th Light Dragoons carried off José’s enormous silver chamberpot (which still adorns their regimental mess) and thus earned the nickname “The Emperor’s Chambermaids.”11
A curious and quite untrue story concerns the making of this picture: that Wellington did not like it, that he spoke slightingly of it to Goya’s face in his studio, and that the hot-tempered, stone-deaf artist (whose ability to lip-read English, a language he could not speak, must have been slight indeed) was only narrowly discouraged from insulting and striking the great general. What really happened, it seems, was that while posing for Goya in the studio in Madrid, Wellington flew into a rage at one of his subordinates for acting without orders. Goya was at a loss to understand why “Lord Willington” had lost his temper, and was immensely relieved when it was explained to him that the Iron Duke was not infuriated by his likeness. Indeed, within a couple of weeks of its completion, the portrait was hung in the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, and Goya wrote to a friend that its subject “manifested a great deal of pleasure” when he saw it.12
ONLY TWO PAINTINGS documenting the actual work of war can be connected to Goya’s 1808 visit to Zaragoza, and they were done from memory aided by now-lost sketches some years afterward, around 1810–14. They show two vital aspects of munitions manufacture that had to be carried on clandestinely by partisan groups in the wild recesses of the Sierra de Tardienta, about thirty miles outside Aragón: the making of gunpowder and the casting of shot. Each had its difficulties. Homemade gunpowder, a mixture of finely ground sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter, is unstable and apt to explode at the smallest spark. Making small shot requires a “shot tower” from whose top molten lead can be poured. It cools in free fall on the way down, solidifying into small spheres: buckshot. A secret tower was obviously out of the question—the French could have seen it miles away. Larger-caliber lead balls need to be cast in individual molds, and that is going on in Goya’s picture Making Shot in the Sierra de Tardienta. In a woodland scene of great beauty and freshness, with the pale-blue, jagged peaks of the sierra in the background, three groups of men are at work in the shade of immense oaks, which themselves have a meaning as symbols of endurance. The group on the right is melting lead over an open fire and ladling it into molds to cool. On the left, the cooled shot is being trimmed from its sprues with shears and stacked in pyramids. At the center, three men are working a primitive tumbling mill: a barrel on a horizontal axis, supported on posts and turned by two handles. When it is laden with the roughly trimmed shot and turned, the friction of the lumps of lead against one another wears them down like soft river pebbles, rounding them and so giving them a more ballistically efficient shape.
Goya, Fabricación de balas (Making Shot in the Sierra de Tardienta), c. 1810–14. Oil on board, 33.1 × 51.5 cm. Palacio de la Zarzuela, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.12)
Goya, Fabricación de la pólvora (Making Powder in the Sierra de Tardienta), c. 1810–14. Oil on board, 32.9 × 52.2 cm. Palacio de la Zarzuela, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.13)
Goya wants to take us through the process, with careful and correct information. His respect for workers and their work demands that. He wants to be quite sure that we know what these men are doing for their country; that we do not see them as merely allegorical or symbolic figures; that they are real and present to us as fully skilled people, as concretely necessary to the work of war as any soldier. Goya reminds us that resistance means mutuality, teamwork, and it is not just a matter of some fine turkey cocks in gold braid saluting and presenting arms. Men work for freedom. The same spirit infuses the companion picture, Making Powder in the Sierra de Tardienta, but if anything more clearly so.
Both pictures may well represent the doings of a patriotic Aragonese named José Mallén, a shoemaker from Almudévar who organized a group of guerrillas into making powder and shot in the mountains outside Zaragoza in 1810. One of Goya’s friends remarked on why Goya wanted to paint such activities: he sought to record “the hatred that he felt for the enemy; which, being his natural way of feeling, was increased on the invasion of the Kingdom of Aragón, his native land, whose immense horror he wished to perpetuate with his brushes.” There can be no doubt about Goya’s sincerity, any more than one need feel the least skepticism about the excuse he gave the secretary of the Academy of San Fernando explaining why he could not be at the inauguration of his portrait of Ferdinand VII: “His Excellency Don José Palafox called me to go to Zaragoza this week in order to see and examine the ruins of that city, with the intention that I should paint the glories of its inhabitants, something from which I cannot be excused because the glory of my native land interests me so much.”13 Goya was certainly telling the truth, and indeed there would have been no real contest between seeing the ruins of Zaragoza, so intensely interesting to a patriot journalist, and having to gaze once more on the uninspiring countenance of the future Bourbon tyrant.
Goya’s image of powder making is an eyewitness’s account. Gunpowder is made by crushing separately two naturally occurring ingredients, sulfur and saltpeter, and carbon, prepared by burning wood. When mixed in the correct
proportions, these become an explosive compound. In the painting we see the crushing being done in the most primitive of stamping mills: a group of a dozen or so men, each with a wooden mortar and pestle. In the foreground lies a sieve, which will sift the powders to the correct fineness. Next to it a figure in white—possibly a woman, to judge from the hair—is preparing boxes to be filled with the mixture. Other people are carrying full boxes away. Behind them stands the bearded, white-shirted powder master, probably José Mallén himself, directing the whole operation.
It was very difficult to get art materials during the war, and Goya’s small paintings of shot casting and powder grinding are witnesses to that: one is painted on an irregular cedar panel that may have come from an old door, the other on a piece of pine board that bears traces of a coat of green paint from some earlier domestic use. The rarity of good materials highlights Goya’s generosity in giving away his stock of fine artist’s canvas, always in short supply, to the defenders of Aragón, who needed it for bandages. Under such shortages, to paint a large canvas was an act of particular emphasis: it asserted that the subject was really important. Hence it was of peculiar significance that three of Goya’s biggest noncommissioned canvases were of common, ordinary working people who could not possibly have paid for them (or, probably, wanted to). Moreover, no upper-class collector was likely to want big pictures, two-thirds life-size, of unadorned and nonallegorical proletarians—a knife grinder, a female water carrier, men hammering iron at a forge—as décor for his walls. So what was going on?
Certainly, more than meets the eye.
For whom were the pictures painted?
Probably not an individual but a general public: a public that needed to have its faith in Spain as a secular reality reinforced at a moment of extreme crisis; that needed the strengths of the Spanish people as a pueblo, not an abstraction of class, affirmed for it; that knew it must believe in Spain’s ser auténtico or perish. But how did Goya expect these pictures to be seen by the public in the absence of museums or other venues for temporary exhibition in the modern sense? One cannot guess.
Each of the three figures is, in his or her own way, an emblem of resistance—and not at all an abstract one. One of the features of the Zaragozan resistance most often pointed out as proof of the sheer stamina of Aragonese patriotism was the toughness and defiance of the women. Undeterred by sniper fire, shot, and shell, they fought hand-to-hand against the French soldiery and, as Goya noted in the caption to plate 5 of the Desastres, they were “like wild animals.” They carried food and ammunition to the men on the ramparts; a woman named María Agustín became celebrated for the jug of brandy she lugged around to give the men courage. And of course they also carried water, without which men cannot fight. The Water Carrier, with her lidded pitcher and her basket and tin cups, has to be one of these indomitable women. We see her from slightly below, towering over us. She rises up like an emanation of the Spanish earth, legs firmly apart, thickset—la ben plantada, “the Well-Planted One” of Catalan folklore, in person. She is painted roughly but with perfect tonal judgment; in places the pigment is almost troweled on like mortar. She is not pretty, exactly, but her youth and vigor are impressive and reassuring. You would be very grateful to see her if you were crouched stiffly behind a rock in the parching autumn sun of Aragón, breathing hot dust with the ricochets whining above.
Goya, La aguadora (The Water Carrier). Oil on canvas, 68 × 52 cm. Szépmvészeti Múzeum, Budapest. (illustration credit 8.14)
In the same way, both The Knife Grinder and The Forge are locked into the imagery of resistance. The Forge is a straightforward painting of three blacksmiths at work. It is based on a sepia-wash drawing of three men digging, but here the field hoes are replaced by tools of the smithy; a long-handled hammer in the hands of the white-shirted man whose back is closest to us, and a pair of tongs with which his partner is pushing the red-hot workpiece down on the anvil. The men are as strong as horses, the forms of their muscular arms and the brilliantly articulated back are like rocks, and their faces are coarse to the point of peasant brutishness. They, too, are unmistakably representatives of the pueblo, hammering out Spain’s future—to use a common phrase of the day, which may have supplied Goya with the allegorical dimension of his painting—on the anvil of its history.
Goya, La fragua (The Forge), 1815–20. Oil on canvas, 181.6 × 125.1 cm. The Frick Collection, New York. (illustration credit 8.15)
Goya, El afilador (The Knife Grinder). Oil on canvas, 68 × 51 cm. Szépmvészeti Múzeum, Budapest. (illustration credit 8.16)
In one of the more famous phrases of the Peninsular War (as famous in its time as Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe’s immortal response to the Nazis’ demand for surrender at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge: “Nuts!”), General Palafox had promised the French “Guerra y cuchilla”—“War and the knife.” The knife was the basic guerrilla tool, because it was the basic rural tool. One of Goya’s Disasters (this page) shows a dead man at the stake, garrotted by the French por una navaja—for carrying a pocketknife. It was certain death to have one found on you during a French search. Goya’s knife grinder is a fairly low-looking man—as low, say, as the white-shirted martyr flinging out his arms at the French muskets in the Third of May. Low-class, low-origin, lowbrow. He has the greasy sheen of sweat on his unshaven face as he crouches to his task. But the slow rotation of the big grinding wheel is inexorable, and one is put in mind of the proverbial millstones of God. You can almost hear the sibilant rasp of steel on stone. He is the Frenchies’ doom: the pig-stubborn pueblo, who will keep sharpening when he should know he is beaten.
Goya, Coloso (The Colossus), c. 1810–12. Oil on canvas, 116 × 105 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.17)
If this trio of large canvases obliquely commemorates the war, a fourth, probably datable to about 1810–12 (it is listed in Goya’s inventory of possessions for 1812), seems directly to allegorize it. Today it is known as The Colossus or Panic, although its original title was The Giant. In part because of its extraordinary drama, this painting is one of the most frustratingly enigmatic Goya ever made. Who or what is this enormous, muscular figure, rising in an attitude of angry defiance like a boxer taking his stance—but a blind boxer, his eyes tight shut—above the gently rolling landscape of northern Spain? Is he walking in the distance beyond the hills or rising out of the ground, a vast emanation of the Spanish earth itself? Why are those terrified people and farm animals fleeing in all directions, impelled by an inscrutable panic? They are refugees, obviously; men, women, families. Wagons are loaded with their possessions. Their livestock are scattering. It is a scene of utter confusion. You cannot know whether the giant is a benign personification of Spain, bracing and ready to beat off its attackers, or an emblem of the feared and hated power of Napoleon’s army. Among the various possibilities, the most intriguing, perhaps, is Nigel Glendinning’s suggestion that Goya’s image illustrates a prophetic poem by the Basque writer Juan Bautista Arriaza, La profecía de los Pirineos (The Prophecy of the Pyrenees, 1808), which envisions a guardian spirit rising from the mountains to crush Napoleon.14
And then, of course, there are the images of the war that come more or less directly from Goya’s own experience of its battlefields. He had been an indirect observer, since one may discount the possibility that he had ever seen battle with his own eyes. But he had certainly visited some of its sites. We do not know with any certainty how many of the Desastres were inspired by Goya’s return visit to Zaragoza. The only one that certainly was shows a scene that he could not have witnessed while he was there, since he went in the lull between the first and second phases of the siege.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 7, ¡Qué valor! (“What courage!”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 15.2 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.18)
This is plate 7, ¡Qué valor! (“What courage!”). It is the only conventionally “heroic” plate in the whole series—heroic in that the artist presents a character
as entirely courageous and worthy of admiration, neither a helpless victim, nor a person driven by terror to involuntary acts of courage, nor a bestial and atrocious intruder: in short, as a citizen in full command of her humanity. This person was already a legendary heroine when Goya reached Zaragoza: she was Agustina of Aragón, a young Zaragozan woman who, with complete disregard for her own safety, had clambered over the bodies of slain defenders on the ramparts of the city (a pile that was said to have contained the corpse of her lover) in order to fire a twenty-six-pound cannon at the advancing French. (She survived the war: a proud Spanish friend pointed her out to Lord Byron some years later as she took the air among admiring citizens on the paseo in Sevilla.) It is an unforgettably powerful image: the ponderous cylinder of the barrel under the control of this slender creature, whose face we do not see but whose determination radiates through every line of her body; one cannot suppress a shudder at the thought of her feet balancing precariously on the corpses of her fellow citizens as she lowers the match to the touchhole. Much of its power, of course, comes from the geometrical severity of Goya’s composition, which in its way is as Neoclassical as a David: the pyramidal hill, the heavy arc of the wheel on which the cannon is mounted, and the higher pyramid of the heap of bodies culminating in the figure of Agustina all tersely combine the impression of impersonal force with individual sacrifice.
The bravery of women in defense of their home territory, their patria chica, is an important theme running through the Desastres. All witnesses to the defense of Zaragoza, French as well as Spanish, agree that the women of the town fought with unrelenting desperation, not only giving support to the fighting men by carrying water, powder, shot, and food to their positions, fortifying strongholds, and making barricades, but often by hurling themselves in Medealike fury on the invaders with whatever weapons came to hand—kitchen knives, stones, improvised pikes. In the background of plate 5, Y son fieras (“And they are like wild animals”), Goya has etched the epitome of such a clash: on the left, a woman holding a rock over her head, about to heave it at a Frenchman; on the right, the French soldier leveling his musket at her. Complete inequality, woman against man, the Stone Age against gunpowder warfare. But in the foreground, at least, the brave women have their moment. In front of a confused heap of figures struggling on the ground, a woman assails a Frenchman with a pike. Pierced in the groin, he reels back like an insect on a pin. She has her baby on her hip, as though carrying it at market time. The conjunction of the helpless child with the mother’s determined assault is brilliantly theatrical.