by Carlos Rojas
In a vast salon, lit by large crystal chandeliers, His Catholic Majesty King Carlos IV was posing, accompanied by his august family. Behind him two large paintings covered a good part of the wall. On the right, an elusive landscape in the translucent light of dusk or dawn. On the left, the wantonness of three naked titans, a male and two females, frolicking as they embraced. At one end of the room, behind the royal models and in front of the giants’ bacchanal, a tall canvas mounted on two easels. Sandro told himself that the monarch must have been very strong before he had aged prematurely. His chest, covered in medals and crossed by the blue and white sash of the Order of Carlos III, was that of a burly old man made for Leonese wrestling. His younger brother, Infante Antonio Pascual, peered over the shoulder of the sovereign. He was younger but looked older than the prematurely aged king. Both of them contemplated Sandro with identical, very light blue eyes, where torpor mixed with a weary sadness. Three other infantes formed part of the group. The prince of Asturias, Don Fernando, almost hid his brother, Don Carlos María Isidro, behind his narrow shoulders and long arms. Sandro told himself that the anomaly of the precedent was repeated in their generation, because Infante Don Carlos seemed to be a kind of aged elf, shorter and drier than the heir to the throne, as well as more advanced in years. The youngest of the brothers, Don Francisco de Paula, dressed in scarlet and adorned with the sash of Carlos III, occupied the center of the group. He could have been anywhere between five and ten years old, with an ordinary kind of beauty and a crafty glance disconcerting in so young a boy. The prince of Borbón Parma, son-in-law of the monarchs and a nephew related by blood to the queen, was young, blond, and very tall, though already paunchy in his youth. He held an infant in his arms, almost a newborn, and already decorated with the order of his great-grandfather Carlos III.
Queen María Luisa raised her head, her breasts, and her shoulders, as if she were attempting to overshadow her own daughters. Her high hairdo, adorned with a diamond pin shaped like an arrow, accentuated her prominent height. Sandro thought he remembered having read somewhere that the coiffures of the queen, appropriate to a much younger woman, both amused and scandalized Napoleon in Bayonne. In the family group, the queen was the only one who smiled vaguely at Sandro as she observed him fixedly. That toothless smile upset him very much, just as Don Francisco de Paula’s perverse glance did. María Luisa enclosed the shoulders of her youngest daughter with one of her heavy arms, di Contadina o di pescivèndola di grido. The infanta was thin, pale, and rather ugly. In her hair, light brown with orange-tinged locks and highlights, was another pin like her mother’s. Her older sister, Carlota, hid behind the prince de Borbón Parma. She showed only a birdlike profile and a cheek made rosy by cosmetics. Sandro also recalled that some writer of the time, Villa Urrutia or Lady Holland, said she was hunchbacked. Another girl, rather tall and with large breasts adorned with the order of María Luisa, which all the ladies displayed, stood erect at the side of the prince of Asturias. Sandro could not see her face, turned to the wall where she looked at the orgy of the giants. Between Fernando and the unknown girl he glimpsed a witch in a feathered wig, as brazen and old as death itself, with narrow, light blue eyes, a copy of the king’s gaze. She was Infanta María Josefa, the older sister of the king and Don Antonio Pascual.
This was the family group. Someone, whom Sandro could not bring to mind, was missing. It must have been the man called to immortalize these august personages on the canvas resting on the easels. Whoever he was, Sandro could not recall his name. The lantern he was holding went out, and he kneeled to put it on the floor. The smiling glance of María Luisa followed him, resting on his shoulders and his hips as if he were a stable boy. Surprised, he turned his head to see that the panels on the closed door behind him were a double mirror in which all those present were reflected. At that moment he was stunned by the queen’s voice. It was shrill but affable, lisping on account of her toothless gums and somewhat melodic in her Italian singsong.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” the queen said to him. “We’re ready and waiting for you, just as you ordered. You can begin the painting whenever you like.”
Then he woke up.
THE DISASTERS OF WAR
THE DREAM OF REASON
May 3, 1808, in Madrid
The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill
The canvas, housed today in the Prado, is one of the most important and largest of Goya’s paintings. It measures six feet, six inches wide by nine feet, ten inches high. In the absence of Fernando VII, who would return to Madrid two months later, Goya offered his services to the regent of the kingdom, to honor his return and his victory over the French. Presiding over the regency was the cardinal Don Luis de Borbón, primate of all the Spains, brother of the countess of Chinchón, and Manuel Godoy’s brother-in-law. Six years earlier, on May 22, 1808, he had written to Napoleon, assuming “the sweet obligation of spreading at the feet of the Emperor the homage of his respect and fidelity” and entreating His Imperial and Royal Majesty to put his obeisance to the test. Now, on March 14, 1814, the cardinal primate employed a very different language when he dictated the sanction approving Goya’s project:
“Let it be known that on the twenty-fourth day of this past month D. Francisco Goya, H. M.’s Court Painter, directed to the Regency of the Kingdom a statement of his ardent desires to perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions or scenes of our glorious insurrection against the tyrant of Europe, and making manifest the state of absolute penury to which he finds himself reduced and as a consequence the impossibility of his defraying alone the expenses of so interesting a work, he requests that the public treasury provide him with some assistance to carry it out. With this in mind, and with Your Highness taking into consideration the great importance of so praiseworthy an enterprise and the well-known ability of the aforesaid practitioner to carry it out, I have deemed his proposal a good one and have consequently ordered that while the aforesaid D. Francisco Goya is employed in this work, he be paid by the central Treasury, in addition to what his accounts indicate was invested in canvases, materials, and paints, the amount of fifteen hundred copper reales a month as compensation.”
The order was issued that same day, and Goya signed the receipt. Two months later, on May 11, 1814, May 3, 1808, in Madrid: The Executions at the Príncipe Pío Hill and May 2, 1808, in Madrid: The Battle Against the Mamelukes adorned a triumphal arch erected next to the Alcalá Gate, to celebrate the return of Fernando VII, nicknamed The Desired One. In La Gaceta that morning a royal decree annulled the Constitution voted into effect in Cádiz two years earlier, as well as the Parliament, and all its resolutions. On the Calle de Alcalá, the crowd cheered the king, roaring “Long live the Inquisition!” “Long live Fernando VII!” “Long live our chains!” On the Plaza Mayor the mob invaded the Casa de la Panadería, destroyed the memorial to the Constitution of Cádiz, and dragged the pieces in a sack past the prisons and barracks crowded with imprisoned liberals. Goya, who had signed the effigy of the Intruder King, Joseph Bonaparte, in his Allegory of the City of Madrid, and then painted portraits of his generals Guye and Querault and his minister of police Manuel Romero, accepting the Order of Spain and Joseph I from the hands of the usurper, was not interfered with on that day of festivities and persecutions. No doubt he was sheltered by secret, personal orders from Fernando VII, the only one who could protect him under such circumstances.
It has been said that May 3, 1808, in Madrid: The Executions at the Príncipe Pío Hill was an unexpected act of contrition. Jean François Chabrun correctly pointed out that if this were the case, no greater repentance could be imagined. Further, Goya could not have painted that slaughter and May 2, 1808, in Madrid in two months’ time. The drawings of The Disasters of War, whose date is unknown, are intentional or unintentional drafts for The Executions. Two sketches for May 2, 1808, in Madrid survive: an oil on paper, currently the property of the duke of Villahermosa, and another oil on wood, which had been in the Lázaro G
aldiano Museum.
The Executions at the Príncipe Pío Hill take place at daybreak, probably just before dawn, the preferred time for executions in every civilized country, as Hugh Thomas so correctly says. Antonio de Trueba took the statement of an old servant of Goya’s, who perhaps confused true lies with incredible truths when, more than half a century later, he recalled that night. The old man told Trueba that Goya had witnessed the slaughter through a window at his villa on the banks of the Manzanares, by the light of the moon and with a spyglass. The anecdote is baseless, since Goya did not acquire the Deaf Man’s Villa, the Quinta del Sordo, until 1819. In 1808 Goya was living in a house he owned on Calle de Fuencarral at the corner of San Onofre. It may be true, however, that Goya insisted on going to the Príncipe Pío Hill, escorted by his servant, to sketch those who had been killed. Like someone conjuring all the monsters in the dream of reason, he would entitle one of the Disasters of War “I saw it.” In another, at the foot of a pile of corpses, not very different from the pile of dead in the painting, he would write his denunciation to the impassive universe: “This Is Why You Were Born.”
“We sat on a rise, with the dead at the bottom, and my master opened his portfolio, placed it on his knees, and waited for the moon to come out from behind the thick black cloud that hid it. At the foot of the rise something fluttered, growled, and panted. I . . . I confess I was shaking like a leaf; but my master remained perfectly calm, preparing his pencil and pasteboard almost by touch. Finally the moon shone as bright as day. Surrounded by pools of blood, we saw corpses, some facedown, others faceup, one in the posture of someone who kneels and kisses the ground, another with his hands raised to heaven pleading for vengeance or mercy, and some hungry dogs feeding on the dead, panting in their eagerness and growling at the birds of prey that flew in circles above them, wanting to compete for the prize!”
Isidro, the servant, recounted asking Goya why he insisted on painting the savagery of men. “To have the pleasure of telling them for eternity not to be barbarians,” his master replied. Regardless of the invention of the servant or of Trueba himself, in this account based on fact, the victims, covered in their own blood, some facedown on the ground, others fallen, looking up at the firmament, and almost all of them with their arms spread, seem to agree with the old man’s testimony. But Goya does not confine himself to depicting the dead he saw at the foot of the Príncipe Pío Hill; he also portrays the executions themselves, which he could not have seen from the Quinta del Sordo. The shooting and the shouting were over when he reached the place with Isidro; but Goya painted the killers he did not know from the back, and at the same time he painted the howls of death he would never hear.
Some have died. Others are going to die irremediably. The same men who killed the first were now preparing to kill the rest. No one can accuse them because neither the painter nor we will ever see their faces. And we do not know the names of many of the victims, although the features of some of these men about to be shot would be forever unforgettable. All of them, in fact, the executioners and the condemned, probably belonged to the same social class and to very similar worlds. But they spoke different languages and would never understand one another. The shouts of the condemned were as impenetrable to the firing squad as they were to Goya himself in his deafness, which in a sense we share with him before his painting.
In his book Goya: The Third of May 1808, Hugh Thomas describes the soldiers in detail. They are Frenchmen and belong to the Napoleonic armies, for they wear the drab trousers that sometimes replaced the troops’ gaiters during the imperial period. This was when the shako was imposed, imitating the helmets worn by the Polish cavalry serving France. The sword with a rectangular hilt was typical of the period and of Napoleon’s officers. The members of the firing squad were probably from the Legion de Réserve, which a short time before had guarded the Atlantic coast, or any of the twenty “provisional regiments” that the emperor sent to Spain, a total of thirty thousand men, when he still supposed that second-rate forces would be enough to take control of the country. It is also possible that these soldiers come from the Italian, Swiss, German, or Polish detachments of the French army. In any case, they would have been humble, perhaps illiterate creatures forced to wear a military uniform because of orders they did not understand or a poverty they knew all too well. Hugh Thomas rejects the possibility that the executioners in the painting formed part of the Garde Impériale, which at the time was protecting Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and the interim viceroy assigned to Madrid.
The day before, once the popular uprising in Madrid had been crushed, the first executions began at three in the afternoon against the walls of the convent of El Buen Suceso. The shootings continued until well into the following morning in the Prado, the Buen Retiro, before the walls of the Convent of Jesús, in the Casa de Campo, along the banks of the Manzanares, in Leganitos, in Santa Bárbara, and at the Puerta de Segovia. Between four and five in the morning (the preferred time for official massacres in the name of civilization) the last forty-three men were shot to death on the slopes of the Príncipe Pío Hill. One of the condemned, Juan Suárez, managed to escape at the last moment. Pursued by shots, he was lost from sight in the dark and finally took refuge in the Hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida, whose frescoes Goya had painted eighteen years earlier and where the artist’s decapitated corpse now rests. The names of some of the canaille executed in the name of reason, law, and order in the clearings on Príncipe Pío have reached us. Rafael Canedo, occupation unknown. Juan Antonio Martínez, beggar. Julián Tejedor de la Torre, blacksmith. Manuel García, gardener. Manuel Sánchez Navarro, an employee of the courts. Martín de Ruicarado, stonecutter. Juan Loret, shopkeeper. Antonio Macías de Gamazo, unskilled laborer, seventy years old. Domingo Braña, muleteer employed by the Tobacco Custom House. Fernando de Madrid, carpenter. Lorenzo Domínguez, saddler. Domingo Méndez, mason. José Amador and Antonio Méndez Villamil, hod carriers. Also on the list is a cleric, Francisco Gallego Dávila, chaplain at the Monastery de la Encarnación, who is probably the friar awaiting death, kneeling, with his hands tightly clenched, on Goya’s canvas.
All or almost all of them were men who could have shared the hungers of the disinherited with those who were shooting them. (An exception was a boy of a more comfortable class who dies there: Antonio Alises, page to Prince Don Carlos María Isidro.) It is also very likely that not all the victims were innocent. When on March 23 Murat had entered Madrid at the head of his troops, the people gave him a welcome reserved for an ally. Somewhat disconcerted, the crowd courteously applauded that marshall of the empire with his long black curls, Siberian fox jacket, crimson shako with peacock feathers, and scarlet boots. The cuirassiers of the Garde impériale deserved great huzzahs. The infantry (the Legion de Réserve or the forces of the “Provisional Regiments”) was welcomed with baffled pity. No one could have imagined imperial troops so exhausted and badly dressed, or in worse formation. The same men the public felt sorry for then formed the firing squads. The day before, Sunday, May 2, many of those soldiers, isolated in the labyrinth of streets surrounding the Plaza Mayor or the Palacio de Oriente, would be gutted with knives. In a French military hospital, Madrilenian attendants coldly slit the throats of the patients and the wounded.
If the victims in The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill had survived that night, as Juan Suárez did, on the following day they would have turned into executioners. Goya could have entitled his painting With Reason or Without It, the name he would give to the second etching in his series The Disasters of War, in which other soldiers of the Legion de Réserve hack at guerrillas with their bayonets. In the next print, it is the guerrillas who cut up the French with axes and pikes. This etching has a two-word caption written in Goya’s somewhat trembling hand: “Lo mismo,” The Same Thing.
Undoubtedly forced by the firing squad, the stonecutter, the beggar, the mason, the court clerk, the manual laborers, and all the other prisoners die on their knees. This is why the dea
d lie with their arms spread wide, trying in vain to brush away the darkness of an impossible sky, the same sky that the friar perhaps persists in attempting to capture between his hands. Civilization will subsequently teach us to shoot people who are standing, which is much more dignified, modern, and honorable for the accused. Perhaps this reform began in our war for independence. Etchings 15 and 38 offer us two of the favored variants of the period. In the first, “and there’s no solution,” the prisoners are executed on their feet, tied to a post, and blindfolded. The contrary method, “Savages,” consists in riddling with bullets the back of a man tied to another post, or perhaps the same one, in this way salvaging the handkerchief that would have been used to blindfold him.
In the human center of The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill, placed a little to the left of the spectator and the geometric center, Goya’s ragged pauper shouts eternally. Fired by rage, to judge by his expression, he is the only one who does not plead for clemency or mercy. He dies with his eyes open wide, challenging his executioners or proclaiming beliefs that for him are sacred. His right palm is clearly pierced and perhaps his left as well, as Folke Nordstrom indicates in Goya, Saturn, and Melancholy. The same writer interprets the vague, blurred figures to the left and behind the prisoners as a Pietà, in which the Virgin hides the face of her Son against her breast to spare him the Calvary of these men. It should be remembered that Goya always headed his letters with a cross, even though he was fervently anticlerical and perhaps no longer believed in the immortality of the soul. Almost at the end of The Disasters, a skeleton returned from death identifies it in writing with nothingness. The epigraph emphasizes this: “Nothing. The event will tell.”