Goya, Los desastres, plate 64, Carretadas al cementario (“Carried off to the cemetery”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 16.5 × 20.3 cm. (illustration credit 8.29)
Goya, Fernando VII in an Encampment, c. 1814. Oil on canvas, 207 × 140 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.30)
Toward the end of the series, that is to say in 1814, the war ended with the expulsion of the French from Spain and the return of Fernando VII, El Deseado, to the throne. This meant a change of work for Goya: he was obliged to reinvigorate his old job as painter to the king, left on one side by his patriotic feelings during the reign of the rey intruso José I. Fernando did not pose for portraits now. He was far too busy. Goya based them on prewar sketches. They are among his more routine portraits. In the first, done for the town hall in Santander, Goya obeyed a fairly detailed program, to be carried out in fifteen days. The likeness of the king must be full-length, full-face, and dressed in the uniform of a colonel of the guards.17 His hand must rest on a statue of Spain gloriously crowned with laurel; beside it, on the pedestal he leans on, one must see the attributes of kingship, a crown and a mantle; at his feet will be a lion, surrounded by broken links of chain, which in Goya’s rendering look rather like fragments of dog biscuit. It is a wholly uninspired performance for so great an artist, though it is no worse than the second version, now in the Prado, in which Fernando is seen in a military encampment—the sort of place that this cowardly and unmartial king, who never drew a sword in anger and hardly even knew how to stay on a horse, avoided like the plague. Nevertheless, there are horses and tents in the background, and the king’s chubby hand is resting on his sword hilt.
Before long, Goya was back at work on his etchings. He saw with the utmost clarity what the restoration of Fernando was going to mean for liberty in Spain, and he devoted the last plates of the Desastres, the so-called Caprichos enfáticos, to further prophecy of horrors yet to come. As their nickname implies, these “caprices” are very close to the Caprichos of some fifteen years before, but they are not funny at all and are, if anything, even more laden with premonitions of doom. The old regime, its Church powers, and its aristocratic reactionaries will come back with even greater force, says plate 67, Ésta no lo es menos (“This isn’t the least”), showing bent old toffs in frock coats carrying the wood-framed effigy of a female saint with a rosary on their backs while another of them clangs a handbell to announce their approach. Like Brueghel’s drawing of the blind leading the blind, a single file of cloaked men and priests descends into darkness, linked together by a rope from neck to neck, in plate 70, No saben el camino, “They don’t know the way.” In plate 71, Contra el bien general (“Against the general good”), a bald and heavy-lidded creature—a sort of recording demon, with a quill, the talons of a bird of prey, and vampire wings sprouting from his head—minutely inscribes laws and lists in a big book open on his lap, a clear allusion to the lists of names and the repressive laws brought in by Fernando’s return. Plate 72, Las resultas (“The consequences”), also refers to the monarch’s return: a flock of Goya’s nightmare bats, the lay and Church parasites that accompany Fernando, is descending on prostrate Spain. One of them is gobling at the half-alive body. Plate 76, El buitre carnívoro (“The flesh-eating vulture”), with its half-plucked bird of prey, comic and repulsive, being harried by the Spanish pueblo led by a sturdy peasant with a pitchfork, tells its own story of the expulsion of Napoleon from Spain; while plate 77, Que se rompe la cuerda (“Let the rope break”), shows a Catholic prelate teetering along a muchmended slack rope, like an incompetent circus funambulist, just above the heads of a derisive and hostile crowd. In the original sketch for this, the cleric wore the triple tiara of the pope, a sufficient comment on Goya’s religious convictions at the time. But as previously discussed, it was quite possible then, and still is now, to be both fiercely anti-clerical and deeply religious.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 67, Ésta no lo es menos (“This isn’t the least”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 17.7 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.31)
Goya, Los desastres, plate 72, Las resultas (“The consequences”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 19 × 22 cm. (illustration credit 8.32)
Goya, Los desastres, plate 77, Que se rompe la cuerda (“Let the rope break”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 17.7 × 20.3 cm. (illustration credit 8.33)
At their end, the Desastres de la guerra open outward, beyond mere human stupidity and detestable cruelty into a pessimism so vast and desolating that it can fairly be called Shakespearean. The subject, once more, is Fernando’s Spain and Goya’s fears for it: but those fears go beyond place and policies, becoming forecasts one would not wish to hear but must listen to. In plate 69, Nada. (Ello dirá), a cadaver rotted down almost to a skeleton is half-disinterred; before a confused mass of watchers, including a dark figure with the unbalanced scales of Justice, it displays a sheet of paper, its one message from beyond the grave. “Nada,” it says. Nothing. It has all been for nothing: the countless deaths, the misery, the rape, the pillaging, the dismemberment of Spain. And, as in Lear’s words, “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.” And this nada extends beyond the grave: the corpse testifies that nothing is there either: no Jesus, no angels, no eternal consciousness, no mercy, no redemption, no heaven, and, because it has already fixed itself on earth, no hell. In plate 79, Murió la verdad (“Truth died”), we see Goya’s beautiful figure of Truth, a corpse stretched on the ground, emitting rays of light. These will soon be extinguished in the dark earth by her gravediggers, mostly priests, with a bishop—the absolutists’ ally, as ever—implacably intoning the last rites over her body. The only mourner who genuinely weeps is Justice, on the right, with her now useless scales. But even so, there is still a narrow margin, the merest thread, of possibility for hope. In plate 80, ¿Si resuscitará? (“Might she revive?”), lovely bare-breasted Truth begins to shine again, to move, while those who would bury her recoil in confusion, clutching their shovels and books. A feverish and tentative hope is reborn in Goya’s darkness.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 69, Nada. (Ello dirá) (“Nothing. [He will say.]”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 17.7 × 22.8 cm. (illustration credit 8.34)
Goya, Los desastres, plate 80, ¿Si resuscitará? (“Might she revive?”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 16.5 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.35)
And so the great cycle of etchings closes. What was their public effect? In a word: nada. Goya had little to fear from the reactions of Spanish patriots to the Desastres, although many of them would surely have taken offense at the images that show a moral equivalence between Spanish and French brutality. But the last prints, the Caprichos enfáticos, could have been deadly, not only to his reputation, but to him. Fernando VII did not and could not put up with such bitter and piercing insults, especially since his own rule would prove utterly chaotic. In Fernandine Spain truth was no defense. So Goya kept the Desastres from being printed. Not only did they remain unpublished during his lifetime (which ended in 1828, five years before the monarch’s); the first edition of the Desastres did not appear for nearly half a century after it was begun, in 1863. And so it came about that the greatest anti-war manifesto in the history of art, this vast and laborious act of public contrition for the barbarity of its author’s own species, remained unknown and had no effect whatsoever on European consciousness for two generations after it was finished.
GOYA HAD HOPED, most passionately, to change people’s minds about war. But in general we don’t know and, in the absence of relevant letters from Goya or memoirs of his opinions by those close to him, we probably never will know exactly what the artist’s frame of mind about popular Spanish patriotism and the French usually was, even assuming that it didn’t fluctuate with the sway of events. Goya has often been taken for an unwavering and deeply conscienceladen crusader of the brush and the etching needle, fighting with all his imaginative powers for Spain and against France. This is untrue. No question, he hated and despised Fernando VII. But he was not a simple-minded
patriot celebrating “Spain, right or wrong.” Much of his sympathy was with the afrancesados, and he loathed what, in a later age and another country, would be called jingoism. The complexity of his attitudes is hinted at and, in part, gauged by the peculiar career of another of his paintings, done slightly earlier.
In 1810, in Madrid, two years into the war, Goya accepted the task of painting the picture that ended up being known as the Allegory of Madrid. Originally the commission came from Tadeo Bravo de Rivero, a former Peruvian deputy who had come to know and admire Goya through Josefa Goya’s in-laws. Bravo de Rivero had become a municipal councilor in Madrid in September 1809, and a few weeks later the mayor’s office commanded him to arrange “a portrait of our present sovereign” by “the best artist that can be found.” That man, the Peruvian was certain, could only be Goya. It may be that Goya was unwilling to do the job, but the price was quite high for a portrait, 15,000 reales, and—what was evidently an important aspect from the painter’s point of view—José I did not have to be present in his studio: in fact he could not be, since he and his court left for Andalucía early in January 1810. Hence, Goya could not be accused of having had Napoleon’s brother as his guest or studio visitor. The king’s profile was copied from an engraving, or possibly a medallion supplied by Bravo de Rivero. Perhaps Goya would not have done it at all except for the fact that he was acutely short of money. Five years would have passed by the time he resumed his old salary of 50,000 reales as chief court painter—a quarter of a million reales lost, a small fortune. So he agreed to do the picture, and Bravo de Rivero mentioned that he had advanced the “professor” some money on his work, “corresponding to the size of the painting, which could hardly be less than 15,000 reales.”18
Goya, Alegoría de la Villa de Madrid (Allegory of Madrid), 1810. Oil on canvas, 260 × 195 cm. Museo Municipal, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.36)
The Allegory of Madrid is not one of Goya’s greater works, but in terms of history and of an artist’s relations with shifting power, it is a very interesting one. As a painting, it is a fairly standard late-Rococo glorification piece, with angels blowing trumpets, Fame brandishing a laurel wreath, the proper complement of armorial crests—the stemma of Madrid rests on a cushion at lower left; a cartouche depicts a bear picking honey from a tree—and a pretty, somewhat insipid crowned blond maiden personifying Madrid. If it had been meant as a straight portrait of José I, the composition would have been very different, centering on and emphasizing the king. Instead, he is prominent but to one side, and his likeness was a picture of a picture, enclosed in an oval that Miss Madrid is pointing to, held up by a pair of winged geniuses and now containing—what? Originally, a profile portrait of Napoleon’s brother. Clearly Goya felt few qualms about glorifying the man against whom, on the second of May in 1808, the Madrid pueblo had risen. Above the portrait of José I he added a flying figure of Fame, blowing her trumpet; and behind Fame, a figure of Victory, holding a laurel crown. To complete the allegorical recipe he added, sitting happily at Madrid’s feet, a white dog, symbol of fidelity.
Then, in 1812, after Wellington routed Napoleon’s army at the battle of Salamanca, Joseph Bonaparte and his court decamped from Madrid. It would have been improper to have Madrid pointing to him, so Goya accordingly painted him out, replacing his profile with the single word “Constitución”—the document ratified in 1812 by the Cortes in Cádiz, Spain’s first genuinely liberal constitution. But the paint on the letters was hardly dry when Bonaparte came back to Madrid as king, and his portrait had to reappear, like the miraculous image of some country saint, in the oval. Whereupon the fortunes of war shifted once more, and José I was expelled, this time for good, in 1813. His effigy was painted out for the second time—not by Goya, who must have been getting fairly bored by then, but by one of his artist assistants, Dionisio Gómez—and replaced by “Constitución.” It did not stay there long. The Desired One, Fernando VII, returned to Spain as king, and one of his first acts was to annul the 1812 Constitution. His policy of erasing from public places and monuments all references to the Constitution, “as if it had never been written,” took some time to get around to Goya’s picture, but eventually, in 1826, the oval was ordered to be repainted once more: out with “Constitución,” in with the likeness of Fernando. By then Goya was living in Bordeaux and had only two years to live, and in any case El Deseado vastly preferred the work of his own rather frigid Neoclassicist court artist, Vicente López. He did not trust Goya to glorify him, and he had good reason not to. López’s portrait of the royal toad stayed in the oval until ten years after Fernando’s death; in 1843 the city of Madrid had it painted out and replaced with the words “Libro de la Constitución,” “Book of the Constitution.” This phrase remained for nearly thirty years until it was replaced, in 1872, by “Dos de Mayo,” a phrase whose patriotic significance everyone, liberal, democrat, monarchist, or black reactionary, could venerate. With that, the burlesque of allegory came to an end, and Goya’s painting settled down to mean the exact reverse of what it did at first. This may be the earliest known ancestor of Stalinist-style photo retouching. Not even Generalissimo Franco, the stumpy tyrant whose narcissism knew no bounds, seems to have thought of getting another artist (Salvador Dalí, perhaps?) to insert his chinless profile into that much-revamped oval.
SO GOYA COULD and did respect the best of French influence, and he was under no illusions about the sanctity of all Spaniards, upper or lower. And yet he knew a colossal injustice had been done to the Spanish people by the Napoleonic invasion, and so he permitted no ambiguities in the creation of his two great propaganda pieces, the Second and the Third of May. Those two dates became sacred and emblematic in Spain almost as soon as they occurred. They were celebrated in folk song, in oratory, in poetry—though not, or not immediately, in painting or sculpture. They stood for the reemergence of Spain into full, heroic, modern nationhood. The Dos de Mayo recalled, for Spaniards, “the glories of Spain when Spain had been the strongest power in the world.” Every anniversary of the Dos de Mayo would be greeted by fulsome effusions of patriotic verse:
O de sangre y de valor gloriosa día!
Mis padres cuando niño me contaron
Sus hechos, ay! y en la memoria mía,
Santos recuerdos de virtud quedaron.
O glorious day of blood and bravery!
When I was a child my parents told me
Of your deeds, and in my memory
Blessed recollections of virtue were fixed.
Thus wrote the esteemed Romantic poet José de Espronceda, the “Spanish Byron,” in 1840, and he went on for thirty-seven stanzas.
To praise the events of the Dos de Mayo was to make a public declaration of one’s own patriotism—a claim that was of particular interest to Goya once the war was over—and in 1814, with Napoleon out of Spain, Goya asked to be commissioned to paint them. He was broke, or said he was. He wrote to the council of regency, which preceded the restoration of Fernando VII. His letter has not been found, but a council document of March 9, 1814, remarks that Goya is in “absolute penury” and wants “assistance” from public funds “to perpetuate with his brush the most notable and heroic actions or scenes of our glorious insurrection against the tyrant of Europe.” One can take his protestations of neediness with a grain of salt now, though it was fortunate for Spain and for Spanish art that the regency did not. The truth about his motives, however, would seem to be a little more shaded. Goya needed to affirm his credentials as a good, loyal, anti-French Spaniard now that Fernando was back in the saddle.
While Joseph Bonaparte was ruling Spain, as we have seen, Goya had willingly done the portraits of eminent Josefinos, members of the French king’s circle. Would this cause Fernando, a firm believer in censorship, who regarded painters as little more than court servants and did not particularly like Goya’s work anyway, to view him as a traitor? Today we take it more or less for granted that artists will paint for whoever may be in power: work is work, and must be fou
nd where it can be. Even Josef Thorak, Hitler’s sculptor laureate, author of whole series of muscular ideal youths and rock-breasted maidens personifying German nationalism and the glories of the Hitler Youth, was eventually forgiven by the repentant Germans and ended up doing idealized portraits of the rich avant-garde collector, for all the world as though he were Andy Warhol—who, given the chance, would probably have served the Nazis with enthusiasm. But that was not the view of the Desired One, who on his return to Spain instituted purges wherever he felt suspicion applied—and he was a most suspicious and vengeful man. Worse still, Goya had accepted a decoration from the appreciative Joseph Bonaparte: the Order of Spain, known derisively among the Spaniards as la berenjena, “the Eggplant.” In May 1814 an investigation of court personnel was launched to determine who had and had not collaborated with the French regime. It was therefore essential, not only in order to keep working as court painter for Fernando VII but also to stay free, that Goya should clear his name as a patriot. There was something a little parodic about this. It was unlikely that even the most suspicious judge or functionary would think a stone-deaf man of sixty-eight would present much of a threat to Bourbon interests, and, as for the Eggplant, Goya stoutly denied that he had ever worn it—a claim backed up by at least one witness at the investigation: his parish priest. Goya got the commission, not for a lump sum, but for a salary of 1,500 reales a month over the time he worked on it.
The two paintings, Goya’s climactic utterances on war (each about eight feet by ten), titled the Second of May 1808 and the Third of May 1808 (this page) were received by Fernando VII’s restored regime. Once completed, were they installed with pomp and honor on some suitable public wall, where the pueblo who were the collective hero of Goya’s commemoration could see and reflect on them? Apparently not; they drop out of the records and do not reappear until 1834, long after the deaths of both Goya and his royal patron, when they are noted as being in storage—two decades after they were painted, and not even on display!—in the Prado. Perhaps Fernando saw them, and that sluggish and paranoid brain felt a tiny needle prick of alarm: the glory Goya was attributing to Spanish resistance was that of ordinary people, not dynasts. Or perhaps someone else at court disliked them. They are not recorded as being on public view in the Prado until 1872, when they finally appear in the museum’s catalog. One wonders why, since Goya could hardly have planted himself more firmly or passionately on the side of the Spanish people and against Napoleon’s mercenaries, although that is not to say that he regarded the insurrectionary mob as angelic or the regime of Joseph Bonaparte as demonic.
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