Goya

by Robert Hughes

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 1, Modo con que los antiguos españoles cazaban los toros a caballo en el campo (“How the ancient Spanish hunted bulls on horseback in the countryside”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 25 × 35 cm. (illustration credit 9.22)

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 2, Otro modo de cazar a pie (“Another way of hunting, on foot”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 24.7 × 35.5 cm. (illustration credit 9.23)

  The next stage in Goya’s bullfighting story comes with the introduction of Moorish fighters, which dates the action before the expulsion of the Muslims by Fernando and Isabel in 1502. The idea that the Moors were particularly interested in bullfighting and became largely responsible for making it into a social ritual is historically untrue; in fact, they had no particular interest in the corrida. Padre Sarmiento, an eighteenth-century Spaniard, declared that “it is commonly said that the corrida de toros was bequeathed to us by the Mahommedans. I have yet to see any proof.” Nicolás Moratín, however, believed it. Being an ilustrado, he thought the rite of bullfighting was essentially primitive and uncivilized, and one way to reinforce this point was to attribute its origins to the “barbarous” Moors. Goya followed him—partly, one suspects, because it gave him an opportunity to reuse the turbans and exotic baggy-pantalooned costumes that his Mameluke mercenaries would be wearing in his 1814 military setpiece of the Second of May. Plate 3 introduces them with an odd thought: “The Moors being established in Spain, dispensing with the superstitions of the Koran, take up this art of hunting and spear a bull in the countryside.” Actually there is no prohibition in the Koran against killing bulls or cattle of any sort—the pig is the unclean animal—but perhaps Goya felt that bullfighting made foreigners more truly Spanish and, in a way, naturalized them. Without question, he thought of bullfighting as a noble sport, one that elevated the torero to heroic stature and did nothing to demean the aficionado. In this, his feelings were completely opposed to the more refined sensibilities of the ilustrados. So we see, once again, how deeply rooted his reactions were in the “old” Spain, despite all the arguments his “enlightened” friends may have made against such preferences. Goya etched his Moorish toreadors and picadors in the Mameluke uniforms he had seen Napoleon’s mercenaries wearing in Madrid, and thus garbed, they bring into play tauromachy’s basic weapons and some of its popular suertes—suerte being a suggestively ambiguous word that meant, among other things, “fate” or “luck” or “stage of the bullfight.” He credits the Moors with inventing the play with the cape or, for their purposes, an albornoz, or burnoose; he follows the opinion of Moratín and of Pepe Illo that they also introduced “harpoons or banderillas” into the arena to disorient the bull with pain and so wear it down, which we see happening in plate 7.

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 6, Los moros hacen otro capeo en plaza con su albornoz (“The Moors made another pass at the bull with their cape”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 24.7 × 35.6 cm. (illustration credit 9.24)

  As bullfighting gradually lost the elitist and ceremonial character it had acquired in its conversion into a “royal” sport in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so the afrancesado culture-snobs who regarded it through French eyes as a barbaric vestige of primitive Iberia turned against it. The development of the modern corrida, with its high degree of formality, its codified passes, and its strict, hierarchical star system, belonged to Goya’s youth, the mid-eighteenth century: it happened not in Andalucía (as foreigners, gulled by the image of the hot-blooded south, sometimes mistakenly think) but in central and northern Spain, particularly in Navarra and Aragón. And just as the rules and conventions of the corrida changed, so did the animals themselves. Selective breeding produced the modern bull, which, as a comparison of Goya’s etchings with today’s animals will instantly show, is a very different beast from those depicted in the Tauromaquia. Goya’s bulls are, at a guess, about four hundred pounds lighter in adulthood than today’s equivalents. Today’s animal is like a big black truck, slow in acceleration but with tremendous inertial power. Goya’s bulls could turn on a dime. They had horns like ice picks, deadly sharp. The form of the animal was what gave such thrilling definition to the newly developed forms of the suerte. The desire to torear was constantly producing new moves, which could captivate the fans and become associated with the names of the bullfighters who invented and, at the peril of their lives, refined them. It is not absolutely true, but contains enough truth to be worth repeating, that small, fast bulls favored inventiveness and stardom.

  There was no shortage of “enlightened” critics who perceived the corrida as a gaudy and demeaning entertainment, the mob’s way of self-debasement. Spanish ilustrados had a mean, puritanical streak. They were too apt to invoke the fetish of “utility” when telling their inferiors what they should and should not do. They most emphatically did not believe in art for art’s sake. Jovellanos, for instance, held that poetry had a duty to be socially useful. The luces opposed bullfighting—shades of the English Puritans and their view of bearbaiting!—not because it was cruel, but because it was a drain on public working time. The corrida reminded them of its Roman ancestor, the circus—and one of the most noted tracts against bullfighting, the anonymously written Pan y toros, deliberately echoed in its title the Latin phrase panem et circenses, “bread and circuses,” as a synonym for vain distraction handed down to pacify the ignorant mob. By the same token, rulers who were not “frenchified” (or were actually French but wanted, for political motives, to flatter the crowd’s sense of its own Spanishness) were more likely to encourage bullfighting: Fernando VII was all in favor of it, as a means of currying favor with the people whose tyrant he was, and Joseph Bonaparte, during his brief reign in Madrid as José I, spent government money to restore the plaza de toros and even abolished the admission fee to corridas. It was a curious fact, noted by several early tourists in Spain, that much as the Spanish clergy might dislike public theater as a source of immorality, they tended not to disapprove of bullfighting and never made a concerted effort to ban it. Unlike the zealous English Methodists, remarked that great Spanish traveler Richard Ford,

  neither the cruelty nor the profligacy of the amphitheatre has ever roused the zeal of their most elect or most fanatic.… The Spanish clergy pay due deference to bulls, both papal and quadruped; they dislike being touched on this subject, and generally reply Es costumbre—it is the custom—siempre se ha praticado así—it has always been done so, or son cosas de España, these are things of Spain—the usual answer given as to everything which appears incomprehensible to strangers.… The sacrifice of the bull has always been mixed up with the religion of old Rome and of old and modern Spain, where they [sic] are classed among acts of charity, since they support the sick and wounded; therefore all the sable countrymen of Loyola hold to the Jesuitical doctrine that the end justifies the means.12

  Goya’s Tauromaquia is generally thought to belong to the years 1814–16. The prints are not the work of a young man. He was on the edge of seventy by then, and at a point midway between the heartrending documentary cruelties of the Desastres and the mystifying obscurities of the Disparates.

  Goya was looking back, mainly to experiences of his youth, when he was an aficionado and may even, so legend and rumor had it, have got in the ring with his own sword. That was not necessarily implausible, because although he had not been raised in his rural birthplace, Fuendetodos, the city of Zaragoza was by no means remote either in time or place from the countryside—and country kids were always playing at being toreros, not just with fake wickerwork bulls but with real ones. Charles Yriarte, one of Goya’s earliest biographers, wrote that he had seen a letter from him to Martín Zapater (now lost) signed “Francisco, el de los toros [he of the bulls].”13 Certainly, he always found pleasure and sometimes a kind of psychic healing—a relief from depression—in going to the corrida.14 There is, however, nothing to support the claim of his earliest biographers that he had been a professional bullfighter.

  Some of the plates in the Ta
uromaquia show Goya’s singular power for remembering, or at any rate for feigning, the authenticity of documentary events through a mass of sharply specific detail. But here as elsewhere in his graphic work, the dating is unsure. It may be that some of the earliest plates were done before 1808, when the War of Independence broke out, and that the series was then laid aside to be finished later. It begins as a study of the origins of bullfighting and then becomes a description of events in the ring, involving bullfighters he once knew as a younger man or famous events he may or may not have witnessed—the death of the matador Pepe Illo, or the spectacular impalement of the mayor of Torrejón on the horns of a bull run amok in the stands of the Madrid ring in 1801. This latter image is, of all the Tauromaquia plates, the one nearest to modernism. Why? Because of the naked power with which Goya has played off void against solid, black against light, empty space against full. Three quarters of the plate is empty, except for the parallel benches from which the audience has fled. The lower right quarter is jammed with shapes of people darting hither and thither in panic. One’s gaze shifts in this melée between huge, blunt shapes and tiny poignant ones—for instance, the minuscule detail, which you do not see at first, of the mayor’s shoe protruding beneath the bull’s neck, a reminder of the vulnerability of human life in the face of so powerful a killing machine.

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 21, Desgracias acaecidas en el tendido de la plaza de Madrid, y muerte del alcalde de Torrejón (“Fatal mishap in the stands, and the death of the mayor of Torrejón”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 25.3 × 35.7 cm. (illustration credit 9.25)

  The series includes bullfighters who altered the technique and the history of their art. One was Pepe Illo, the literate Sevillian torero who wrote one of the earliest texts on bullfighting; we see him in plate 29, elaborately bowing to the bull, like a noble to his superior, and in the magnificently stark plate 33 he meets his death, on his back on the sand of the Madrid ring in May 1801, the black bull goring him. The death of Illo gets two other plates in the series, 38 and 39, each showing the bullfighter being tossed around on the horn of the beast.

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 33, La desgraciada muerte de Pepe Illo en la plaza de Madrid (“The unfortunate death of Pepe Illo”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 24.9 × 35.5 cm. (illustration credit 9.26)

  Other notable fighters are commemorated in the series. Goya knew, or had known, some of them. Plate 27 depicts a torero who fought in Zaragoza in 1767 and whom Goya knew: Fernando del Toro, from Almonte, who is shown on horseback inciting a skittish and high-strung bull to charge. Plate 22 celebrates a famous woman bullfighter named Nicolosa Escamilla, a star of the Zaragoza ring in Goya’s boyhood, known to her many fans as La Pajuelera (the match seller) for her street career before she made it into the arena. She is lancing a bull from horseback. Goya also paid tribute to what all agreed was the loco valor (demented bravery) of a fighter from South America, probably Peru, named Mariano Ceballos, who pursued his career in the Spanish arenas in the 1770s. Goya (and his thousands of other fans) particularly admired how close he worked to the horns, and in plate 23 we see him killing a bull from horseback—not with the long spear used by La Pajuelera, but with a sword, which plunges into the bull’s spine as its hastas (“spears,” the respectful term for horns) are only inches away from him and his horse’s belly. Ceballos’s specialty, though, was fighting one bull while riding on the back of another, and in plate 24 he is performing this peculiar suerte on a black bull that, rearing up in the air as it closes on its victim, seems to develop a momentum nothing could resist.

  But the torero Goya most admired, and was closest to as a friend, was the great Pedro Romero. He was also the first bullfighter to achieve fame and celebrity in the modern sense. His grandfather Francisco had introduced the muleta: a fan-shaped short cape that concealed the sword and thus enabled the torero to confront the bull face-to-face, on foot, instead of killing it from horseback. In the mid-1790s Goya painted the dauntless young man (who, by his own count, had killed about 5,600 bulls in three decades of fighting), and two decades later he etched him in plate 30 of the Tauromaquia, about to drive his sword into the tense, frozen animal’s back—a moment rendered all the more dramatic by the contrast between, on one hand, the curved shadow line on the sand of the arena, the dark garment of the torero, and the black weight of the bull’s forequarters and, on the other, the whiteness of the paper on the right side of the print, a whiteness that reads with dazzling, bleached clarity like a blast of sun.

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 24, El mismo Ceballos montado sobre otro toro quiebra rejones en la plaza de Madrid (“This same Caballos mounted on another bull breaking his swords”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 24.9 × 35.9 cm. (illustration credit 9.27)

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 30, Pedro Romero matando a toro parado (“Pedro Romero killing a bull”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 251 × 359 mm. (illustration credit 9.28)

  Included in the series are certain oddities that have now disappeared from the vocabulary of Spanish bullfighting, though some of their spirit survives in a mutated, comic form in some rodeo clown acts (mojigangas) in the American Southwest. In one plate, a torero spears a bull while sitting on the shoulders of his chulo (ring mate). In another, a bull is fought by two men in a coach drawn by a pair of mules.

  The Tauromaquia is part memoir and part fantasy. It is not a systematic “history” of bullfighting, any more than the Desastres make up a “history” of the war against Napoleon. But it is an invaluable record, not least for the peculiarities it pays tribute to. Decades ago, at the outset of his career, the bullfighter El Cordobes was sharply criticized—and wildly adored by fans—for his showbiz innovations, which, along with his romantically long hair, reminded the more conservative bullfight critics of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. But El Cordobes was a positively “classical” fighter compared with some of the oddities Goya showed in his Tauromaquia, forms of behavior that look like a deadlier version of the antics of Western rodeo clowns and would never be permitted in a bullring today. In plate 20, “The agility and daring of Juanito Apiñani in the Madrid Ring,” the bullfighter—whose career was at its peak between 1750 and 1770 in Madrid and Zaragoza, and whom Goya almost certainly knew of when he was a boy, as kids today follow the careers of baseball champs—is behaving more like a tumbler, pole-vaulting between the beast’s horns. Plates 15–16 and 18–19 commemorate the “locura”—outright craziness—of “the famous Martincho”; his identity is unclear (several toreadors went by that name), but he may have been Antonio Ebassum, who fought in the ring at Zaragoza in 1759, when Goya was still a teenager, and again in 1764. Martincho’s special act was confronting the bull while wearing ankle irons, an almost insane handicap that he nevertheless appears to have survived. In plate 18, “The daring of Martincho in the Zaragoza bullring,” he perches on the edge of a chair as the bull, horns down, comes bursting out of the gate. He is waving his sombrero like a muleta to incite the great beast, and he sights along the blade of the sword. He will have only one thrust to make the kill, because the bull is almost on top of him and his feet are shackled.

  As if this weren’t suicidal enough, Martincho has another deranged trick for Goya to record. There he is in the middle of the ring, standing on a cloth-draped table with no visible weapon at all. Once again his feet are bound together—not even with a chain, which permits them some movement, but with a rigid bar, which allows none. A bull is charging at him, and he seems tensed to jump on top of it. Clearly Martincho can’t get away from the bull, since he can’t run, and he won’t be able to ride the brute, since he can’t open his legs. He has no choice, it seems, but to be trampled and gored, unless he manages to leap clear over the animal’s back—which, according to the traditions of the ritual, is just what he is poised to do, leg irons and all. Perhaps the assistants, in their long cloaks and wide hats, who are clustered at a prudent distance have some idea; but there is no sign that they do.

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 20, Ligereza
y atrevimiento de Juanito Apiñani en la plaza de Madrid (“The agility and daring of Juanito Apiñani”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 25 × 36 cm. (illustration credit 9.29)

  Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 19, Otro locura suya en la misma plaza (“More of his craziness in the same bullring”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 24.7 × 35.5 cm. (illustration credit 9.30)

  The Tauromaquia was one of the two series of etchings that Goya printed and published himself, the other being the Caprichos. For this reason alone, it has always had a special allure for collectors. Moreover, its popularity, at least in Spain, was more or less guaranteed: it is a “heroic” narrative, with none of the sharp and biting ironies and occasional obscurities of the Caprichos. Its subject matter, though harsh and death-laden—and, of course, repulsive to the animal-rights faithful—is not terrifying like the Disasters of War. And anyone who has a minimal acquaintance with the history and vocabulary of bullfighting can understand it, which is certainly not the case with the later, and often hermetically obscure, images of the Disparates. Moreover, it had an exotic appeal outside Spain—if not in England, then certainly in France, whose art-following public was also becoming aware of the foreignness of core Spanish rites, epitomized by the corrida. For these reasons, the Tauromaquia has long been the most enjoyed of Goya’s etched series, if not necessarily the greatest or the most coherent. In fact, its plates vary quite widely in quality. But the best of them, such as that sublimely intense image of the death of the mayor of Torrejón in the front-row seats of the Madrid plaza (plate 21), are among the finest of all Goya’s graphic work.