Goya

by Robert Hughes

  Vivan las cadenas,

  Viva la opresión;

  Viva el rey Fernando,

  Muera la Nación!

  (Long live our chains, long live oppression; long live King Fernando, death to the Nation!)

  Goya, Black Border Album, 19, No sabe lo que hace (“We doesn’t know what he’s doing”). Brush and India ink, 27 × 18 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (illustration credit 9.1)

  Goya made this episode the theme of a drawing from c. 1814–17. A sturdy workman is up a ladder, leaning against a pedestal. With his mason’s hammer, he has just smashed a classical bust to the ground. His eyes are shut, indicating his blindness. No sabe lo que hace, runs Goya’s caption: “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” It is a deliberate echo of Christ’s words on the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” So much for the collective wisdom of the crowd.

  It seems strange, given Fernando’s use of the mob as an instrument of policy, that he was not more generous or effusive with imagery of the people. But he loathed anything that smelled to him of democracy, and the most bizarre instance of this was what happened to Goya’s great paintings the Second and the Third of May. Fernando’s regime seems to have ignored them completely, and not placed them on view, despite the fact that Goya’s images gave the credit for the May rising entirely to the Madrid pueblo: the paintings did not even make it into the Prado’s catalog until the king was dead. This was consistent with other peculiarities of Fernandine policy. He felt that all the glory should shine directly on the king, not his subjects. For six years after the end of the war, it was forbidden even to raise the idea of a monument, let alone a real monument, to the patriot martyrs of May 2–3. Then, when the so-called Trienio Liberal—the brief three-year period of Liberal government, 1820–23—was ushered in by a revolution against Fernando led by the liberal army officer Rafael de Riego, the possibility opened up again, and it is to this brief window that Goya’s proposal for a monument probably belongs. Nothing he drew or painted more convincingly reveals the effect that French Neoclassical ideas and designs had on Goya than this sketch. It is odd to see Goya, who generally showed no interest at all in drawing architecture, actually designing a building: this one commemorates the dead of May 2 in an idiom exactly in sync with the utopian architects of the French Revolution, specifically Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–99). In April 1812, the Parliament had passed a resolution to commemorate the dead of the Second and Third of May with a sencilla pirámide, a simple pyramid, raised over the spot where they lay in a common grave next to the Prado. Goya’s proposed pyramid was simple but enormous. It dwarfs the Prado, which is seen to its right, and the pedestrians and carriages circulating in the foreground. It would have been hundreds of feet high, pierced by a single arch right through its base—a giant gate, with a tunnel to bring the public through.

  Etienne-Louis Boulée, Newton’s Centaph. Engraving. Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris. (illustration credit 9.2)

  Goya, Great Pyramid, c. 1814. Black chalk, 29.1 × 41.4 cm. Heirs of the Marqués Casa Torres. (illustration credit 9.3)

  FERNANDO’S OBSESSIVELY REACTIONARY RULE boded ill for Goya, for he, like many artists both great and little, was a man of nuanced and somewhat contradictory opinions. He was, by Fernando’s rigid standards, an afrancesado, and in any case he disliked and despised the new king and his opinions. He never said so, but his drawings and etchings amply testify to this. However, he was also, and intensely, a patriot. Goya had been faced with the dilemma of how to make a living in time of war, which is never easy for artists, whatever their convictions. From 1808 to 1814, he had taken no salary as first painter to the king from José I’s administration: he clearly did not think it was right to work, in an official capacity, for the French. He had lived, he testified, on investments and on the sale of goods (jewelry, furniture), plus whatever he could pick up from portrait commissions and the sale of cabinet paintings.

  As we have seen, this was not really true, but it was more true than false. Goya undertook, in 1810, the big Allegory of Madrid with Joseph Bonaparte’s profile portrait, soon to be painted out and replaced by “Constitución” and, later, by “Dos de Mayo”—though he would stress later that el rey intruso did not pose for the portrait, that it was done from a medallion and entailed no direct interaction between artist and subject; they were never in the same room together. He also did portraits for clients from the French occupation, though not many. The portrait of José I was not the only picture Goya would do for the French side. He made a portrait (1810) of José Manuel Romero, who had become José I’s minister of justice in 1809, then of the interior, and finally secretary of state—a man of fierce and unshakeable loyalty to the Bonapartists. Goya’s rendering of this formidable presence with his piercing gaze is the only picture of a royal minister he is known to have done. In October 1810 he also painted José I’s superbly elegant aide-de-camp, General Nicolas Guye, a close friend of General Hugo, the father of France’s great writer Victor Hugo. Goya followed it with an enchanting portrait of Guye’s little son Victor, who served José I as a royal page, looking slightly nervous in his military uniform.

  In 1810–12 Goya produced one of the greatest of all his portraits, commissioned by José I: the likeness of that ilustrado priest Juan Antonio Llorente, who had been appointed to the Holy Office and then worked steadily to dismantle its repressive powers from within, believing that (as he put it) there was “an enormous difference in circumstances” between the Inquisition of the fifteenth century and the form and use it had assumed by the early nineteenth, and that “the tribunal could not preserve its claim to being just if it continued to use the methods of three centuries past.”4 Goya painted fifty-three-year-old Llorente as a sober and imposing figure, the tall black-clad cleric with the red ribbon of the Royal Order of Spain, instituted by José I. But his eyes twinkle and a sardonic smile plays around his mouth: this priest Llorente is no simple character but a brilliant intellectual and an extremely strong one, and Goya has paid full tribute to his strength. The two were friends. Llorente’s Historia crítica de la Inquisición en España, published in 1818, became a fundamental text of the Spanish Enlightenment, and there are especially interesting parallels between its treatment of witchcraft and Goya’s. It was a basic source for many of Goya’s scenes of inquisitorial torment that had dropped out of use by Goya’s time, and which the artist could not have witnessed himself. Llorente, in fact, represented whatever was best about the French administration of occupied Spain. Without for a moment compromising on his religious beliefs as a priest, he became a hero of ecclesiastical humanity. No wonder that he had to go into exile with the retreating French when Fernando VII came back into power, bringing with him all the blackest forces of repression, after 1814. There could have been no place for such men as Llorente under the restored monarchy.

  Finally, Goya did a portrait of José I’s sixteen-year-old Spanish mistress, Pepita, daughter of the marquis of Montehermoso. She was very pretty and “accomplished”; she spoke fluent French and Italian, sang agreeably and accompanied herself on the guitar, wrote verse in several languages, and could paint a quite commendable likeness. Her presence in the royal palace caused José I’s queen, Julie, to depart in a huff for France.

  So much for Goya’s Josefino subjects. It could hardly be said that painting them made him a Bonapartist collaborator. But there remained three awkward matters to explain.

  The first of these dated from 1810, when Goya was sixty-four. On José’s orders, a three-man commission was set up to select fifty paintings from Spanish collections—mostly works “sequestered” from monasteries, churches, and convents that had been shut down, others confiscated from the exiled Godoy’s large collection—as a gift of homage to the emperor Napoleon. Goya was one of its members. This raised in some minds, after Fernando’s return, the thought of Goya the collaborator using his special knowledge of Spanish painting to do the work of plundering for the French. Actu
ally, it meant nothing of the kind. Except for two works by Velázquez and four by Zurbarán, the commissioners picked mostly inferior work by very minor and now largely forgotten names like El Mudo, Collantes, and Cabezalero. One might suppose that Goya was contemptuously steering basement junk toward Napoleon. Apparently the French thought so too, for the works were never sent and another commission, this time without Goya, was appointed to choose new ones.

  Goya, Juan Antonio Llorente, c. 1810–12. Oil on canvas, 189.2 × 114.3 cm. Museu de Arte de São Paulo. (illustration credit 9.4)

  Rather more serious was the problem of the Eggplant.

  In October 1808, after the Bourbons’ flight to France, the newly installed José I had created a brand-new order to be bestowed on Spaniards who had shown loyalty to him. This was the Royal Order of Spain. It was a five-pointed star, dark red in color, bearing at its center the inscription “Joseph Napoleo His-panicarun rex instituit”—“Established by Joseph Napoleon, king of the Spaniards.”5 Because of its color, those ungrateful Spaniards promptly nicknamed it la berenjena, “the Eggplant.” José I handed these out quite freely, and in March 1811 an Eggplant was bestowed on Goya for cultural services.

  In Fernando VII’s inflamed eyes, explaining this was going to take some fancy footwork. It was like getting a Frenchman, circa 1946, to account for his puzzling ownership of an Iron Cross. But Goya, not without some difficulty, convinced the royal investigators that he was quite innocent. He insisted that he had never worn the Eggplant, and he produced witnesses, including his parish priest, to that effect. There seemed little point in pursuing an old and infirm man—Goya was nudging seventy, a patriarchal age for a Spaniard then—over the merely speculative question of whether he had worn a decoration or not. It would indeed have been a grotesque hypocrisy on Fernando’s part to have persecuted Goya for possessing the Eggplant given that Fernando himself, while still in exile in Valencay, had pestered José I to give him that very honor. (This did not inhibit Fernando, after his return, from persecuting other Spaniards who had accepted it.)6 Besides, Goya was likely to be more valuable to Spain if he kept painting, even if Fernando rather disliked his work and much preferred his own court painter, Vicente López. Goya wanted to get on with the Second and Third of May, the pictures that would afford the ultimate proof of his unswerving patriotism. But there remained one more obstacle to the tranquil but busy postwar life he sought.

  It was the Inquisition, which in 1815 decided to investigate him for obscenity.

  The cause was the not-yet-famous pair of portraits, the Naked Maja and Clothed Maja, which a busybody who bore the exalted title of “director-general for seizures” had noticed, along with several paintings of nudes by other hands, in a Madrid storehouse, the Depósito General de Secuestros, where the confiscated collections of Godoy reposed. This bureaucrat duly wrote to the fiscal inquisitor of the Holy Office, Dr. Zorilla de Velasco of the Secret Chamber of the Court Inquisition, whose curiosity was duly piqued. He therefore wrote to an underling that Goya should be looked into:

  Having to proceed against painters in accordance with rule 11 of the expurgation procedure, and given that Don Francisco de Goya is the author of two of the works which have been taken possession of … one of them representing a naked woman on a bed … and the other a woman dressed as a maja on a bed.… the said Goya [should] be ordered to appear before this tribunal so as to identify them and state whether they are his work, for what reasons he did them, at whose request, and what intention guided him.

  It would have been quite useful to future art historians if, in fact, Goya had been made to answer these questions in the presence of a secretary who took his responses down. One would love to know why he did the Majas, and for whom. But this, alas, was not to be. A passing remark by Goya to his friend Joaquín Ferrer ten years later suggests that this was not his first brush with the Inquisition: although he had given the copperplates of the Caprichos to Carlos IV, Goya said, and even though the king had gladly condescended to accept them, “in spite of all that, they denounced me to [the Inquisition].” Nothing came of that first denunciation, and nothing of this second one either. Perhaps the queries about the Majas were suppressed; in any case, no record survives of any further pressure from the Holy Office, and Goya himself never mentioned it again, which he certainly would have if anything further had happened.

  Goya had always detested the Inquisition, although he ran foul of it only in his later life. It had once been as close to all-powerful as any Spanish institution could be—a direct arm of papal power, the Holy Office, founded by Pope Gregory IX in 1233 to suppress any outbreak or even hint of heresy. Through the Inquisition, dissent could be stifled, careers crushed, and even the higher circles of the court made to tremble. It was the instrument through which the essential idea of a pure and perfect Church, inerrant and incapable of compromise with heresy, could be preserved. Through fear and coercion, its effect on the intellectual life of Spain was atrocious.

  What we call the “Spanish Inquisition,” with its dreaded ceremonies of interrogation and torture, its autos-da-fé and burnings at the stake, in all the anti-Semitic fury of its tribunals, came into existence at the end of the fifteenth century with the coronation of Fernando and Isabel. It guttered out about three hundred years later, in Goya’s time. The last person to be burned at the stake in Spain on the orders of the Holy Office was an ilusa, or visionary, named María de Dolores López, who met her fate in 1781, in the reign of Carlos III. Inevitably, a huge body of documentation and legend—an essential part of la leyenda negra, “the black legend” of an implacably cruel Church—was to condense and crystallize around the Inquisition. Most of this was written. Goya was the first important visual artist to let his work speak out against the Inquisition while it was still in existence and presented a threat, however notional, to its critics; and he was the last and perhaps the only one to be threatened by its investigators.

  The truth is that by Goya’s time the Inquisition was entering its decadence. Combined with conservative royal power, it was still an irritant to open thought, but it could not eliminate what the Church defined as heresy or keep “dangerous” books out of Spain. All it could do was make access to enlightened French ideas more difficult and expensive; books had to be smuggled in, and a smuggled book was not cheap. “At the beginning of every avenue of progress, intellectual or material,” wrote the historian Raymond Carr, “stood the Church with its feeble Inquisition as a symbol of Spain’s distance from cultivated Europe.”7 But by the time that the Inquisition became a theme in Goya’s work, it was not much more than a symbol, albeit one freighted with unpleasant memories of much darker times. Intellectuals, writers, and liberal priests like Goya’s friend the cleric Llorente struggled gamely to have this symbol expunged. Goya clearly wished to do in paint and ink what Llorente had done in prose, but he chose to indict not the Inquisition as it existed in 1810–14 but its much earlier, more sadistic and tyrannous form. His depictions of the Inquisition and its victims, which begin around 1810, are works of memory and imagination. They are grounded in fact and in the accounts of supposed eyewitnesses, but they represent things Goya had heard about, not seen. They have the same loose relation to reportage as his Desastres de la guerra: they are free artistic evocations of things that happened in the past. And the past of Goya’s Inquisition images is more remote than the past of the war.

  The Inquisition was not his only subject commenting on Church ceremony and superstition. In the Procession of Flagellants (1812–14), we see one of the spectacles of Holy Week, celebrated most famously in Sevilla but in other cities of Spain as well. Groups of pious laymen known as cofradías (confraternities) were organized to do honor to particular emblems of their cult, representing Christ, his saints, or, especially, the Virgin Mary. Enormous sums were spent on life-size and elaborately lifelike effigies of these holy beings, which were carried in procession (as they still are today) through the streets from their habitual resting place in a church: clothes
, artificial hair, maquillage, everything contributed to a total illusionism that was, in effect, the climax of all hyper-realist tendencies in Spanish Baroque sculpture. Some members of the cofradía were accorded the honor of carrying the heavy effigies. Others preceded and followed it, dressed in black, masked and with conical hats, beating drums and bells and blowing cornets. And the penitentes (repentant sinners), who by surrendering themselves to punishment won grace through the intercession of the Virgin or a saint, were an essential part of the ritual. Garbed only in long white skirts, with their backs and chests bare and dunce-cap corozas on their heads, they would flog themselves and their companions with many-corded whips whose tips were armed with sharp metal or shards of glass. This flagellation produced streams of blood and scars that lasted a lifetime. To be a full-fledged and blood-initiated penitente was esteemed a signal honor, and Holy Week processions were one of the classic bizarreries of Spain. So much did ilustrado opinion detest this sadomasochistic piety, putting it on a level with bullfighting as a sign of irrational degradation, that by 1777 the Holy Week floggings were outlawed. So when Goya (who may, just possibly, have seen one of the last ceremonies of this kind as a youth) painted a Holy Week procession complete with blood-boltered penitents, he was looking back to an older but still mythically powerful Spain. This, he was in effect saying, is the violent and superstitious culture to which the return of Fernando also returns us. It is one with the Inquisition, which the king reinstated and which Goya painted, about 1816, in a companion piece.

  Goya, Procesión de disciplinantes (A Procession of Flagellants), c. 1812–14. Oil on panel, 46 × 73 cm. Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.5)