Two hags are floating in the sky. One has a bony mask of a face, somewhat like Katharine Hepburn far gone in old age. The other, bundled in a red cloak, clings to her as they fly. In the foreground are two uniformed French soldiers, one aiming a trabuco (short blunderbuss) not at the flying witches but at a straggle of horsemen and foot soldiers in the farther distance. What is going on here? Have the witches appeared to put a curse on the French? No really plausible readings present themselves. The painting is a riddle.
The second big picture on the ground floor, facing the Pilgrimage of San Isidro, is the Aquelarre (Witches’ Sabbath). Its chief figure is the devil, in the shape of a gigantic cabrón, or billy goat, sitting on the left with his back to us. It is haranguing an unruly, fascinated crowd of witches, old and young, whose distended and smearily twisted faces are a veritable lexicon of expression, snarling, scolding, glaring. Next to the billy goat, likewise facing the crowd but with her face half-seen in profile, is a squat, coarse-faced woman in a white hooded costume resembling a nun’s habit; to her right she has an array of bottles and vials (a dark and sinister still life that echoes the picnic things Goya often painted in his fětes champětres in earlier years) that must contain the drugs and philters needed for devilish ceremonies.
The only female figure not caught up in emotion at Satan’s diatribe is a young and perhaps beautiful woman who sits well apart in a chair on the right—all the others are sitting or squatting on the ground. Her head is mostly hidden by a black veil, her features are blurred, her hands covered by a muff. This is perhaps a postulant witch who is about to be received into full membership in the coven. The serenity expressed by the flowing lines of her body and the lack of emotion on her face contrast sharply with the jabber and clash of expression in the crowd of women.
Much of the work, including some of the witches’ faces and the horns of the billy goat, was repainted by the Prado’s restorer Martín Cubells when the Aquelarre was remounted on canvas; he also suppressed about a meter’s width of landscape to the right of the young postulant.5 Perhaps these areas were too damaged to keep, for otherwise it is difficult to see why Cubells should have edited them out.
Goya, Aquelarre (Witches’ Sabbath), 1820–24. Oil transferred to canvas from mural, 140 × 438 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.14)
Goya, Sabbath-Asmodeus, 1820–24. Oil transferred to canvas from mural, 122 × 261 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.15)
Goya’s large composition Las parcas (The Fates) is not strictly a witchcraft picture at all, since the Fates, or Moirai, were not witches. Daughters of Night, they determined the course of human life and hence were credited by classical myth with enormous power. In Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, and other classical authors, this life was imagined as a thread. The first Fate, Clotho, wielded the distaff that spun the thread. The second, Lachesis, measured its length. The third, Atropos, snipped it off with scissors, and so was in charge of death—a moment that not even Zeus himself could alter.
It was typical of Goya, however, that he did not stick to this classical and ancient scheme. Floating in the air above that cold, brown-toned landscape with a river meandering through it, we see four figures, not three. They are all of exceptional ugliness.
Goya, Las parcas (The Fates), 1820–24. Oil transferred to canvas from mural, 123 × 266 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 10.16)
On the left of the group, Clotho holds a doll between her hands—a manikin that, in place of the thread, presumably represents a human life.
Next to her is Lachesis, peering through a magnifying glass at what must be the life thread, so fine that her old eyes cannot discern it without a lens.
The third weird sister, on the far right with her back turned to us, holds up a small pair of scissors to cut the thread: she must be Atropos.
The problem is the fourth figure, who seems to be male. His arms are bound behind him. He is a captive, and seems to some critics to represent Prometheus, the hero bound on a mountain peak to be torn apart by an eagle for his crime in stealing fire from Zeus on Mount Olympus and bringing it down to earth for human use.6 But it is not clear from Goya’s painting what possible relation might exist between Prometheus and the offended Fates, so perhaps the bound figure is not Prometheus at all.
GOYA WAS NATURALLY DISTURBED, perhaps even terrified, by the turn of events in Madrid. Chateaubriand’s warning to Fernando VII to moderate the terror had little or no effect on the inflamed king, and the persecution of liberals and Freemasons only gathered momentum. Accordingly, Goya decided to remove his property from the reach of the confiscators. On September 17, 1823, he deeded the Quinta del Sordo over to his grandson Mariano, “because,” the document said, “of the affection I bear him.” He now prepared to quit Spain. For the first few months of 1824, he took shelter in the house of his friend José Duaso y Latre, a Jesuit priest whom he paid for his trouble with a portrait. An inventory of Goya’s possessions at the Quinta del Sordo was made, under his direction and with the help of Leocadia and a young painter friend, Antonio Brugada, who had become his close disciple and owned a farmhouse not far from Goya’s. The old painter now had to devise a way of making an expeditious departure from Spain without arousing the suspicions of the king and his court. This proved easier than anyone thought.
Fed up by now with the arbitrary ferocity of Fernando’s revenge, the allies—France, England, and Russia—determined to apply real pressure to him. In the spring of 1824 the Russian ambassador managed to persuade the king’s confessor to get Fernando to issue and publish a general amnesty. It was seized on at once by discontented Spaniards, and the king had enough sense to perceive that it was the easiest way of getting rid of them: he simply signed passports for everyone who applied for them, and a rush of emigrations ensued. On May 2, 1824, Goya applied for leave to take the waters of the hot springs at Plombières, in southern France, “as his doctors have advised him.” It was almost immediately granted.
Goya never went to Plombières. Instead, he headed for Paris via Bordeaux, where the police spies of the French minister of the interior were ready to keep an eye on him; but they soon decided that he was obviously harmless, a seventy-eight-year-old man who “seems older than he is and is extremely deaf.” In Bordeaux a small group of afrancesado Spanish exiles was eagerly awaiting him. Goya made landfall with an old friend, the writer Leandro Moratín, who reported to his friend the abbé Juan Antonio Melón that the painter had arrived, “deaf, old, awkward and weak, and without knowing a word of French,” as well as without a servant, which he badly needed, but “he was so happy and anxious to see the world.”
He spent three days in Bordeaux and ate with Moratín and his friends “like a young student.” Then he moved on to Paris, armed with a letter from Moratín to his friend, a Spanish lawyer named González Arnao, who was in the habit of helping out Spanish émigrés in need of advice. Arnao arranged lodgings for Goya on the third floor of the Hôtel Favart, in the rue Marivaux. Going up and down the stairs must have been a struggle for the old man, but apart from that we know nothing about Goya’s movements in Paris. He was a complete stranger to its art world, and there is no record that he ever met Delacroix (then twenty-six and already conversant with Goya’s drawings and prints, which he unreservedly admired) or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Did he perhaps visit the Salon of 1824? And if he did, what good would have resulted? He was too old to be influenced by other men. Few people in Paris had so much as heard his name. He was too deaf to talk to them, and knew no French anyway. Ingres, in Rome, had filled sheet after sheet with drawings of the young, the rich, and the talented who came to his studio in the Villa Medici. But Goya scarcely had anything you could call a studio, and the only works he did during his brief sojourn in Paris were two portraits—of a Spanish banker, Joaquín María Ferrer, and his wife—and a fiercely nostalgic little bullfight scene. He saw a number of old acquaintances, refugees from Madrid whose portraits he h
ad painted earlier: the condesa de Chinchón (now entirely separated from the faithless Godoy), whom he had painted as a child and again as a pregnant wife; Pepita Tudo, her rival for the choricero’s love; and the dukes of San Fernando and San Carlos. But there was little to detain him in Paris, and so, his curiosity satisfied, he left in the fall of 1824 for Bordeaux, never to see the capital again. He stayed for a while at a hotel in the rue Esprit des Lois, and then on September 16 moved to a house at 24, cours de Tourny. There he was joined by Leocadia Weiss and her two children, Guillermo and Rosario, who had come north from Spain to be with him.
Goya’s friendship with Moratín continued undisturbed. His relationship with Leocadia was not always so idyllic. “Goya is here with his lady Leocadia,” wrote Moratín on October 23, “and the best of harmony does not prevail between them.”7 Perhaps it was to keep Leocadia happy that Goya showered praise on her daughter, Rosario Weiss, for her precocity as a painter. Not only was this the first time Goya had praised the artwork of a ten-year-old child; it was one of the few occasions on which he had lauded anyone else’s efforts, child or adult—the old man was not lavish with his compliments. For Rosario, he wanted to lay the foundation of a career as an infant prodigy, and wrote enthusiastically to Joaquín Ferrer: “This amazing child wants to learn miniature painting, and I want her to as well. She has remarkable qualities, as you will see. If you will do me the honor of helping me, I would like to send her to Paris for a while, but I want you to look after her as though she were my own daughter.” Little came of this, though it speaks eloquently of Goya’s readiness to help members of his family and to keep Leocadia happy. Little Rosario did not find a position with a studio in Paris, but she took lessons in the atelier of Pierre Lacour, the head of the Bordeaux School of Design and Painting. Later, in 1833, she appears registered as a copyist in Paris, and in 1842 she was appointed drawing teacher to Queen Isabel II, Fernando VII’s daughter.
As for Goya, despite his infirmities, he was excited and optimistic. Already a master without rival of etching, he now embarked on the conquest of a new medium: lithography. At the end of 1825, he wrote to Joaquín Ferrer in Paris:
I sent you a lithographic proof that shows a fight with young bulls … and if you found it worthy of distribution, I could send whatever you wish; I put this message with the print, but hearing no news, I once again ask your advice, for I have three others made, of the same size and bullfight subjects.8
These prints, collectively known as the Bulls of Bordeaux, are the rarest Goya ever did, being issued in a small edition of one hundred sets by the Bordeaux printer Gaulon. The large print of the “fight with young bulls” (1825) shows their experimental nature. Compared with the earlier etchings, it is rough and summary, and in places almost parodic. It represents the moment when the ring of spectators has charged among the bulls, reducing the severity of the ritual to a kind of absurdity, a populist slapstick analogous to the amateurishly chaotic “running of the bulls” in Pamplona. It is drawn in a very broad manner, quite different from the refinement of the etching needle in earlier series, the Caprichos and Disparates. The crowd is swarming all over the place, as suggested by the title, Dibersión de España (Spanish Entertainment). Areas of dark, scribbled rapidly in with the soft lithographic crayon, are then relieved by scraping and scratching to bring back streaks and highlights of white.
Goya’s much younger friend, the painter Antonio Brugada, witnessed him at work in the studio, in all his eccentricity of method. Lithographic stones, being extremely heavy, were generally worked on laid out flat on a table, but Brugada told Goya’s memoirist Matheron:
The artist worked at his lithographs on the easel, the stone placed like a canvas. He manipulated his crayons like brushes and never sharpened them. He remained standing, walking backwards and forwards every other minute to judge his effects. Usually he covered the whole stone with a uniform gray tone and then removed with a scraper those parts which were to appear light: here a head, a figure; there a horse, a bull. Next, the crayon was again employed to strengthen the shadows, the accents, or to indicate the figures and give them movement.… You would perhaps laugh if I said that all Goya’s lithographs were executed under a magnifying glass. In fact, it was not in order to do very detailed work but because his eyesight was failing.9
Actually this was not quite the way Goya did Spanish Entertainment. The whole stone was not covered with a “uniform gray tone”; plenty of its surface was left untouched, whether by crayon or scraper. But there was plenty of scraping and retouching, and the whole effect is much rougher and more emphatic—more caricatural, almost—than in the earlier etchings. Its effects, and those of the subsequent lithographs, are more “painterly.”
That Goya should have taken up lithography when he was already the complete master of etching and aquatint shows his curiosity and willingness to try new mediums, for lithography was very new indeed: it had been invented in the late 1790s.10 It had the great advantage over copper engraving that the design lasted longer under repeated runs through the press, whereas the copper plate tended to degenerate. Lithography is a planographic process, meaning that the design is made on the actual surface plane of the printing “matrix” (in Goya’s time, smooth limestone; later, zinc or even paper) instead of being cut into it by acid or a sharp tool, as in the various forms of etching and engraving. Lithography relies on the proverbial fact that oil and water won’t mix. A design is drawn on a stone in greasy crayon or tusche (lithographic ink). The preferred stone is fine-grained Bavarian Kelheim limestone. It is then treated with nitric acid and gum arabic. The grease in the crayon or ink fuses with the stone. After washing to remove the soluble remnants, the stone is inked. The grease in the printing ink adheres only to the greasy marks on the stone (the design) but is repelled by the wet, unmarked stone. The stone now runs through a press and transfers the design on it to previously dampened, but not soaking wet, paper.
Goya, Dibersión de España (Spanish Entertainment), 1825. Lithograph. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of W. G. Russell Allen. (illustration credit 10.17)
So much for the technique, very roughly described. What opportunities did it hold for Goya? Spontaneity and directness. The creation of form and tone by scratching on copper with a needle means that you have to think about the design not only in reverse (flip-flopped) but also in tonal reverse: the lines that will trap ink and print black on the paper are seen as bright shining copper on the plate.
Lithography, though, is direct. The black mark on the stone will be black on the paper. Moreover, the stone can be worked on directly, scratching and wiping away marks to make the erased portions print white—a process that, with copperplate etching, is either impossible or very laborious.
However, if Goya thought he was going to make money with the Bordeaux bullfight prints, he miscalculated badly. They did not sell. French collectors were not interested in bullfighting. Worse, neither were Spanish ones in Paris, for the simple reason that most of them were émigrés. The Spaniards who had fled from Fernando VII to France were afrancesados, enlightened liberals who tended to regard the corrida as an old-fashioned and barbarically proletarian ritual that did not deserve a place in their refined salons. Knowing and loving the corrida for what it was, Goya did not euphemize. The first of the five Bordeaux bullfighting lithographs (1825) shows a confused melée of dead and dying horses and men, surrounding a tormented bull. One man is impaled on its horn in a terrible cornada. Others, both mounted and on foot, are jabbing their garro-chas into the bull to make it back off and free the man; a blindfolded white horse has collapsed on its knees in the foreground, and other half-dead horses can be made out behind the shapes of man and bull. The figures of the picadors are stock, brutal, and almost simian.
This is no elegant ballet, such as is occasionally seen in the Tauromaquia. It is rawly, almost shockingly, original, as are the remaining four plates, all from 1825. The first, El famoso americano Mariano Ceballos, depicts the Peruvian bullfig
hter Goya had already etched in the Tauromaquia (plates 26–29), doing his crazy trick of riding a bull straight at another bull, about to lance the beast. It is all power and no grace, and much the same is true of the other lithographs.
Since these appeared both clumsy and repulsive to an eye used to French taste, Goya’s friend in Paris Joaquín Ferrer advised him to recoup his fortunes by another means. Why not reissue the Caprichos, which were known to French connoisseurs (including Delacroix) and would find a ready market among them? Goya’s reply to him is a classic of old man’s determination. He felt he was failing. His body told him so. “Pardon me infinitely for this bad handwriting,” he wrote to Ferrer on December 20, 1825. “I’ve no more sight, no hand [poigne], nor pen, nor inkwell, I lack everything—all I’ve got left is will.” But he was not going to admit a failure of will: he would not repeat himself by reprinting fifteen-year-old plates. In any case, he had traded off the plates of the Caprichos to the Royal Calcografía in return for an annuity for his son long ago; and he had new things to do.
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