In a similar way, his painting of the aged San José de Calasanz, done the same year (this page), shows a view of human age completely free of the corrosive satire he had brought to the vain, hopelessly primping old crones in Time in 1810–12. He has perhaps become gentler, if not humbler, with the passing of time.
When his health allowed it, Goya was working on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. X-ray studies of the now detached and remounted mural paintings suggest that his original project was not by any means the frightening and pessimistic one that we see today. In fact, they suggest a decorative scheme that was (relatively) pastoral, conceived and in part done in a quite different state of mind. Beneath the grim and ashily claustrophobic surface of the Pilgrimage of San Isidro, for instance, there was an open view of a river reflecting a three-span bridge: perhaps the Manzanares and the Puente de Segovia. Underneath the cannibal Saturn eating his son, there are traces of a dancing figure with one foot raised. The melancholy, black-veiled portrait of Leocadia Weiss as a widow, leaning on what has been interpreted as a tomb (perhaps Goya’s own) with a railing on top of it, seems to have had no such funereal overtones at the beginning—it was simply a woman, not visibly in mourning, leaning on a mantelpiece as though in her own living room.
Goya, Goya curado por el doctor Arrieta (Self-portrait with Dr. Arrieta), 1820. Oil on canvas, 116 × 79 cm. The Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. (illustration credit 10.7)
Why should Goya have switched from what may have been a less fearsome decorative scheme for his farmhouse to one of such surpassing pessimism as the Black Paintings? Why this passage from the tolerable to the oppressive? Perhaps the answer does not lie in the real world of people and actions. Maybe it existed entirely in Goya’s brain, was inseparable from his depression, and can now never be retrieved or explained. And yet the Pinturas negras were certainly painted in strange times, both for Goya and for Spain.
The regime of Fernando VII had staggered on from one crisis to another. The country, as someone said of Ireland, was “like the carcass of a goose standing up”—skeletal, picked clean, but preserving a macabre parody of normality. Fernando’s economic policies, which absolved the Church from all interference or reform, were a disaster. He could not accept or even perceive the realities of post-colonial South America, and kept having impractical fantasies of seizing the colonies back. And his army officers, far from backing him, were a menace to his regime. Many of them were Masons and bitterly opposed to Fernando’s theocratic absolutism. The Church hated Freemasonry, and so did Fernando (as would every Spanish absolutist down to the days of Franco). But many, if not most, of the leaders and military heroes of the War of Independence were practicing Freemasons. Lodges had sprung up everywhere in Spain over the duration of the war. So when Fernando, inspired by his pipe dream of creating a new army that would cross the Atlantic and recolonize Peru, actually brought together such a force in Cádiz in 1820, all he achieved was to consolidate his opposition. His orders assembled a wasps’ nest of Masons and other members of secret societies, all of whom loathed Fernando, not least because he lacked the money to pay them.
The immediate result was a pronunciamiento, or “pronouncement,” the classical method of transfer of Spain’s civilian power through its nineteenth-century military. It was an officers’ rebellion. Officers would sound one another out, bet on a general resentment, and then “pronounce” by raising the grito, the cry of heroic, principled dissent.3
Since Fernando, in the few short years since he returned to power, had reduced civilian life to an insipid and spied-on monotony while greatly curtailing the perquisites of the military elite that had sacrificed so much for Spanish independence, he was a natural target for a pronunciamiento. The officers’ grito was duly raised at Cádiz in 1820 by a dashing, brave, and extremely vain young liberal officer named Rafael del Riego y Núñez (1785–1823). His aim was to force Fernando to swear on the document he had set out to annihilate, the liberal Constitution of 1812. And for a while, “pallid with rage and fear,” the Desired One had no choice about it.
Lecomte, General Rafael del Riego y Núñez, n.d. Engraving. Museo Municipal, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.8)
The rank and file went along with their officers against the king because they had no wish to die of tarantula bites and tropical fevers in an unwinnable invasion of Peru. The government of Spain now split into a mosaic of local juntas, most of which gave their allegiance to Riego and the sacred Constitution instead of Fernando VII. Thus began the Trienio Liberal, the three years from 1820 to 1823—a uniquely Spanish situation in which an absolute monarch was rendered impotent by two kinds of liberal sentiment: a moderate constitutionalism that accepted the Church, and the more radical views of the anti-clerical exaltados, both entirely dependent on a sedition-ridden army.
Obviously this was (to put it mildly) an unstable situation. The liberals were a bitterly feuding family. Its moderates were not even sure of the feasibility of every clause in the 1812 Constitution. It had been written for the pueblo, but the pueblo was too ignorant to really deserve it. And the old afrancesados, the Spanish “Frenchies,” who hated being seen as traitors and excluded from political life, turned against the liberals, peppering them with often effective criticism. Meanwhile, Fernando was too stupid, paranoid, and obstinate to see that some limited gesture from him in favor of the 1812 Constitution might actually have increased his power instead of isolating him.
In the end, the weak liberal coalition was defeated from outside, and Fernando, exiled by one French regime, had his bacon saved by another. He appealed to the conservative European powers, which were meeting in 1822 at the Congress of Vienna. These decided to send a force to reinstate Fernando for the second time. Under the terms of the Holy Alliance among Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and the command of the vehemently conservative duke of Angoulěme, an army called the Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis (the high-flown name is thought to have been coined by Chateaubriand, then France’s minister of foreign affairs, and it certainly fit his rhetorical style) marched into Spain. This time it met practically no resistance. It crushed the liberals and replanted Fernando securely on the throne. The Spanish Bourbon had been rescued by the French one, Louis XVIII.
This released a wave of revenge and counterterror. It was so extreme that Chateaubriand had to warn Fernando that he would withdraw all French military support if his persecution of real or imagined liberal enemies did not cease at once. Ultraroyalist secret societies, which bore picturesque names like the Exterminating Angel (later to be the title of a film by Luis Buñuel), abetted by priests and nobles, went on a rampage against all those who could, however remotely, be suspected of liberalism. Despite the restraining influence of the French Sons of St. Louis, who occupied Barcelona, between October and December 1824 about two thousand people were murdered there by these extremist secret societies, and of course the level of terror and reprisals in Spanish-controlled cities was far worse. Gangs of ultraroyalists ruled the streets, chanting their slogans: “Long live the Absolute King! Death to the Frenchies! Long live religion! Death to politics! Long live the Inquisition!”
Fernando was so jubilant that he declared he now had “a stick for the white ass and a stick for the black one,” meaning for both liberals and ultras. He appointed some remarkable fanatics to power: the new captain-general of Cataluña, for instance, was the demented Carlos, count of Spain, who had his own wife arrested for treason and danced a jig, in full gala uniform, upon the scaffold at the hanging of some liberals. As for Riego, he was captured in March 1823, jailed, and ignominiously dragged to his place of execution (Plaza de la Cebada, in Madrid) on a travois behind a donkey, sitting on coal sacks. This event set off a wave of powerless liberal sympathy and lithographed ex-votos in France, and caused him to be remembered by the English master of light verse W. M. Praed as the man “whom Tyranny drew on a hurdle / That artists might draw him on stone.”
So the high hopes of the 1812-ers came down to this: a weak but s
till absolute tyranny, the Church in the saddle, the Inquisition back, the Constitution erased. “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos,” Goya had written on one of the Caprichos plates a generation before, and now he set out to record those monsters all over again, at mural scale, in the main upstairs and downstairs rooms of his tranquil farmhouse outside Madrid.
Clearly he did not care about creating a unified allegory or a coherent story. The images of the Black Paintings do not cohere, or not in that way. One cannot even be sure of the apparent links between them, although their original spatial relation to one another is known from old photographs taken while the paintings were still in place.
The rooms were large, each probably 33 by almost 15 feet. Originally the main ground-floor door was flanked by two paintings, the one of Leocadia by the mantelpiece (or tomb) and, on the other side of the door, a vertical image of an old man with a long white beard leaning on a crooked stick while a skinny, wide-mouthed creature (the big mouth being one of Goya’s favorite signs for the demonic) talks in his ear. Or is he yelling in the ear of an old, deaf man—which might make him Goya himself, the infirm patriarch, on the opposite side of the door from Leocadia? It’s anyone’s guess.
The only “historical” personage who can be identified among the paintings is the Biblical heroine Judith, seen brandishing her knife before cutting off the head of the evil general Holofernes. Given Goya’s anger and disappointment over the second restoration of Fernando, it is not implausible that Holofernes stands in for Fernando VII. Many other artists had used the death of Holofernes as a symbol of the defeat of tyranny. But again, this is speculative. Goya leaves no explicit clues, and indeed he would have been foolish to do so, in case some agent of the Bourbon monarch happened to enter the Quinta del Sordo and see the mural. One should remember that these were not only among the most dramatic painted images Goya ever made; they were the most private by far. He had no audience in mind. He was talking to himself. He never imagined that the Black Paintings would be seen anywhere except where he was. Therefore, he could bypass explicit symbolism, and all narrative connections could stay in his own head.
This collision of the laceratingly rhetorical with the hermetic is what gives the Black Paintings their peculiar character, and makes them seem like freakish, vivid precursors of modernity. But they are also strongly fixed in their own time, for they bring to a climax the obsession with extreme feeling that characterizes so much of European Romanticism. A work like Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare (1781) may seem mannered and style-bound compared with these Goyas, but it belongs to the same area of imaginative experience. And while one peers at Goya’s paint surface, so thick, corroded, and mortared; while one admires the daring of its contrasts of tone, the deep chasms of shadow against the glaring highlights that establish the structure of a face, the way a chin or a cheekbone is dragged into being against the surrounding dark by a single oily swipe of a wide, loaded brush, so that the flesh and bone seems as twisted as a Francis Bacon—before finding this wholly unique, it is a good idea to remember how bizarre and without precedent some of J. M. W. Turner’s effects, the “soapsuds and whitewash” of his later landscapes, the strange dazzle and looming fogs of his Petworth interiors, seemed at the time they were painted. It’s just that we are more used to radically extreme and abstract formulations of paint in landscape than in the figure, because we “know” what figures “ought” to look like, what they “really” are.
Goya, Judith and Holofernes, 1820–24. Oil transferred to canvas from mural, 144 × 82 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.9)
Certainly Goya reveled in the emotional power that such direct painting could generate. The Black Paintings are a veritable encyclopedia of its effects. Perhaps the most powerful and weirdly beautiful example is the humped mass of pilgrims’ faces in the foreground of the Pilgrimage of San Isidro, the large mural (approximately 4½ × 14½ feet) that, along with the Aquelarre (this page), dominated the ground-floor room of the house. They are all painted alla prima, in slashing strokes. Most are composed around a gaping hole, the subject’s mouth; the alternation of these black voids with the dense, dirty-creamy impasto of the flesh tones sets up an irregular rhythm across the surface that increases the sense of chaotic energy arising from the howls we fancy the pilgrims are uttering. Their features are deformed, beyond grotesqueness. This is Goya’s bitter and contemptuous vision of the populacho, or pig-ignorant mob, and we may well think that his disgust for it was reawakened by the stirring-up of the masses that Fernando’s henchmen had been practicing all over Spain.
Goya, Perro semihundido (Head of a Dog), 1820–24. Oil transferred to canvas from mural, 134 × 80 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.10)
Not all the images from the Quinta del Sordo can be read, even speculatively, as protests against a failing and unjust absolutism. The dog, imploring us with its eyes from the bottom of what seems to be a well of quicksand, seems to have no political meaning, though it is a sublimely poignant image. That dog’s terrified yearning for safety and its absent master is the misery of man in a comfortless world from which God has withdrawn. We do not know what it means, but its pathos moves us at a level below narrative.
But then, here are two peasants (originally on the upper floor of the Quinta) flailing at each other with cudgels as they sink up to their thighs in some cold bog, under an icy sky. The place is deep country somewhere; a farmhouse and some grazing cattle can be made out in the background. Both men are doomed. They will drown in this mud, whether they keep fighting or not. The face of the peasant on the left is a mask of blood. The one on the right throws up his arm to ward off his enemy’s blows. Nothing can stop this unappeasable feud. One thinks of Bosnia, of Northern Ireland—a condensation of all civil wars into this one murderous pair, Cain and Abel, or perhaps more properly Cain and Cain, in their grubby clothes. We don’t know what they are fighting over. It hardly matters. But someone looking at this painting in 1820 might well connect it to the general suffering of Spain—to that homicidal world of liberales and Exterminating Angels, where men slaughtered others behind the city wall or the pigpen over their allegiance to an absolute but worthless king. This reading does not exclude others, of course. It could be that Goya meant no specific political comment; that he only wanted to make an image of irrational, self-propagating male aggression. Here, as in other rooms of the Deaf Man’s House, we do not and cannot know.
Goya, Duelo a garrotazos (Duel with Clubs), 1820–24. Oil transferred to canvas from mural, 125 × 261 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.11)
Or take the painting that for most people is the most melodramatically horrible of the lot, Saturn Devouring His Son. Actually, the gory cadaver may be a son or a daughter, its gender is undecidable; but its proportions are certainly those of an adult body and not, as in Rubens’s painting of the same theme, which was the origin of Goya’s idea, a chubby infant. Originally, as noted earlier, Goya had a standing figure, doing what seems to be a dance step, against a mountainous landscape; this may even have been an image of life’s joy. But then the darkness closed in, the background was painted out, and Saturn—god of melancholy and, presiding over the “saturnine temperament,” the deity of painters as well—filled the whole frame. The aficionado of Surrealism has seen this awful, stringy body before: Salvador Dalí appropriated the horizontal thigh of Goya’s crouching Saturn for the hybrid monster in the painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936), commonly known as Premonition of Civil War, which—rather than Picasso’s Guernica—is the finest single work of visual art inspired by the Spanish Civil War. What Goya painted is the combination of uncontrollable appetite and overwhelming shame that comes with addiction—Saturn goggle-eyed and gaping, tormented by his lust for human meat, for an unthinkable incest. If he were merely hungry, he would not appall and move us so. And in what sort of society would the fathers eat the young? Surely, one in which the old perceive the new as a deadly th
reat: a society so reactionary that “tradition,” imagined as the absolute reign of total authority, is worth murdering for.
In this way Goya’s Saturn may be meant to direct our gaze back to the values of Fernando VII and his loyalists, an incarnation of a revolution that ended by eating its children. He is, so to speak, Goya’s contemporary—the Exterminating Angel. There is also a theory that depends on identifying Saturn’s child as female.4 If it is, then Goya may have meant the eating of the daughter by her father as a match to the scene next to it: Judith’s murder of the patriarchal Holofernes.
Goya, Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn Devouring His Son), 1820–24. Oil transferred to canvas from mural, 144 × 82 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.12)
Salvador Dalí, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936. Oil on canvas, 99.8 × 100.3 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. (illustration credit 10.13)
But then there are paintings, among them some of the greatest in the Quinta, which seem to have nothing to do with the politics or society of Spain, because they are about that favorite theme of Goya’s: witches and their spiritual relatives. One of these paintings is not clearly about witches, but it is hard to imagine what else its subject might be. It shows an open, windy landscape—Goya excelled at those cold blues, which suggest blasts of air sweeping down from distant mountains—in the middle of which stands an isolated butte of rock with a town perched on it. No way of access to the town can be seen. There is nothing quite like this dramatic inhabited outcrop in Spain, or anywhere else in Western Europe, and possibly Goya derived it from the accounts that were common reading in Spanish descriptions of the Hispanic empire in America—specifically, from the descriptions of the oldest continually inhabited city in North America, the pueblo of Ácoma in New Mexico, forcibly brought into the Spanish empire by the conquistador Juan de Oñate in 1599 and well known, at least from hearsay, by Goya’s time.
Goya Page 43