The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  Ironically, the penultimate sketch for a cartoon that Goya made in the service of the Royal Tapestry Factory had the same theme as the first: The Country Meal. In 1776, through the intercession of Bayeu, they commissioned Goya to create the model for a tapestry that would depict a meal beside the Manzanares. The children of Van Goten, first director of that industry, directed the Santa Bárbara workshop, but the man who really controlled it was Antonio Rafael Mengs, first painter of the King’s Royal Chamber and president of the Academy of San Fernando. Mengs ordered Goya to be paid eight thousand reales “for the moment,” as if the commission were still in doubt. The result, however, pleased him very much and Goya would continue working for the factory until, twelve years later, he grew tired of serving it. This was the close of a period in his life and work that would produce the most finished example of eighteenth-century art. Characteristically, he called the last work of this phase Blind Man’s Bluff. Soon, according to André Malraux, modern painting would begin, also with him, while Goya became Goya after having brushed the doors of death.

  The first Bourbon, Felipe V, founded the Santa Bárbara Royal Tapestry Factory. An English traveler, whose opinion was collected by Antonina Vallentin, visited the twenty looms and wrote with complete justification: “These workshops have been organized in a puerile manner, as a pretentious copy of the Gobelins workshops. The generosity of the King supports them at great cost, and their poor results are attainable only by the most affluent.” Jacob Van Goten and his sons used paintings by Teniers and Wourwerman as models for their tapestries for two generations, until their taste for the French mythological and allegorical baroque began to weary their landed clientele. As for the rest, the industry experienced technical difficulties in a period of enforced transition, in which it could not reconcile its many contradictions.

  Another workshop, directed by the Frenchman Antoine Langer, where Goya’s cartoons would be woven, was united with the Van Gotens’ workshop. The Van Gotens maintained the traditional technique of a low-warp thread, with the chain threads extended horizontally and the chain over the cartoon, which the loom repeated inverted, like a mirror. The eighteenth century brought high-warp thread, among other innovations, and Langer introduced it in the Royal Factory in 1730. The threads of the chain now extended vertically, and the operator traced the contours of the model to be woven onto transparent paper. Nevertheless, he kept the cartoon at his side and turned to it constantly to confirm the fidelity of his work. In this way, as Chabrun observed, the weaving of tapestries lost all substantiality and became mere copying of the painting.

  At the same time, tapestry abandoned its functional value as a screen or portable door and became a decorative element. Jean-François Chabrun pointed out certain engravings of Abraham Bose, printed in the seventeenth century, in which paintings and mirrors appeared hanging on tapestries, which served as walls. One hundred years later the Gobelins would be shown among paintings in the Paris salons, as if they were somewhat shameful imitations of the oils. The industry suffered a crisis in France and in Spain, even though the Spaniards always maintained it artificially. The Gobelins attained technical perfection but were limited to copying known paintings until the Revolution closed down the plant.

  In Spain Mengs attempted to renew the genre with a return to its popular sources. He thought then of a second-rank painter, Miguel Angel Houasse, whom Felipe V had brought to Madrid in 1720 to decorate La Granja with paintings called Men and Women Playing Blind Man’s Bluff, Country Meal, Meal on the Grass, Game of Ninepins, The Swing, Washerwomen. Among the painters contracted at the time by the Royal Factory of Santa Bárbara, Goya very soon proved himself the most gifted and prolific. Between 1776 and 1779 Ramón Bayeu, Francisco’s brother, delivered twenty cartoons; José del Castillo painted seventeen; Antonio Velázquez completed twenty-three; Goya signed thirty in the same period of time. He also gradually reformed the technique of the craft until he transformed it into the first manifestation, brilliant though somewhat hesitant, of his most successful and inalienable work. At first the workers protested because he included an excessive number of nuances and ornamentations in his cartoons, difficult to repeat in silk embroidery. Goya was furious, but then he learned to synthesize the horizon and summarize nature, giving an almost transparent air to the Velazquean light of Madrid in order to accentuate the human dimension of his figures.

  “I have no more than twelve or thirteen thousand reales annually, and even so I am as contented as the happiest man,” Goya wrote to Zapater at that time. In 1785 he would earn another twelve thousand reales for a single painting, his first portrait of the duchess of Osuna. A year later he would be named court painter, along with Mallea and Ramón Bayeu. “My dear Martín, I am now painter to the King with fifteen thousand reales.” In 1780 he became a member of the Academy of San Fernando, with its corresponding compensation. He bought shares in the Bank of San Carlos, forerunner of the Bank of Spain, and at times he complained to Martín Zapater for no real reason while he gradually became wealthier. “My only steady income are the securities from the Bank and my compensation from the Academy.”

  The contradictions that characterized his entire existence were also revealed in the management of his wealth. For a long time frugality was the norm of his household, when a pound of beef cost only two reales and a pound of oat bread the same. He bought a two-wheeled barouche, it overturned, and he hurt a knee that would give him pain for months. Unwillingly he acquired another with four wheels, along with its corresponding mules. Yet he always refused to give up his personal pleasures among la canaille, as he learned to call them in French and in some letters to Zapater. He never missed a bullfight at the Puerta de Alcalá, and was always the welcomed guest of bullfighters and their cuadrillas, with a reserved seat at the barrier. The world of fights, brothels, and taverns in the Rastro and Lavapiés was as familiar to him as the world of bullfighting.

  In part, and as a witness to his time, he must have felt himself an observer of those environments. In part he also must have identified with the city of Madrid, for if he had not been court painter, he would almost certainly have remained there because of his origins. Lustful, a drinker, and antagonistic as a young man, according to his servant, he burned up the last of his youth in quarreling, fighting, and whoring as he approached the age of fifty. In Madrid, which at that time was a village near the rural palaces, his sudden fame must have reached even that nether world behind the Plaza Mayor. If people reminded him of it, he would brush aside any mention of his celebrity. He was just Francho, their familiar companion who would have liked to have been a torero. He was one among many in that hell, which he had known as well as his own house for many years. That’s all, by God. Soon, very soon, he would realize, stunned, how uselessly he had deceived himself.

  He was not ignorant about himself. He was ignorant about his incomprehensible country, the one whose endless disaster was in fact beginning in Goya’s time. El Capricho, the palace of the Osunas that he frequented after painting highly praised but not very accomplished portraits of the duke and duchess, celebrated Mardi Gras for the entire year. Before Goya’s astonished eyes, the slums of Madrid invaded the gardens and salons, not like a windstorm but like a masquerade party. The wide, tight sashes of the majas, the short jackets of the slum dandies, and the dissolute talk of the lower classes replaced overnight the modes, manners, and language of Versailles. Goya, who had learned some French in order not to be out of place among the powerful, and to write pretentious letters to Zapater with almost as many mistakes as the ones he wrote in Spanish, realized in stupefaction that the language of El Capricho had suddenly become the thieves’ slang of Lavapiés.

  Almost immediately, as soon as these people without employment began to open the muffling parts of their capes and mantillas, the true faces of many acquaintances appeared. Not only were the models for Goya’s cartoons and the real personages of Ramón de la Cruz’s one-act farces present, but the actors and bullfighters as well. In other wor
ds, the same people to whom, in another time, holy ground would have been denied after they were dead. Pepa Figueras, Costillares, and Pepe-Hillo were suddenly praised and talked about more than Goya, Iriarte, and Jovellanos. If once the quartets and symphonies of Haydn were commented on, now the volapié and banderillas a topa-carnero were discussed with greater passion. Goya met El Hillo, Costillares, and Figureras in the gardens of El Capricho. Between two pruned trees, not yet greened by spring, a swing had been hung. The duchess of Osuna, that haughty, sarcastic woman, laughed wildly now as she swung above a background of sunlit meadows and woods. With open hands Pepe-Hillo received her and pushed her by the hips. Costillares returned her to El Hillo, caressing her knees as he pushed her back. Pepa Figueras chatted with another actress in farces, the two of them sitting on stools hidden under their wide skirts. A picador whose name Goya perhaps did not remember lay stretched on the ground, his cheek resting on his hand and his Cordoban hat pulled low as he contemplated with a smile the duchess’s ankles at each swing of the rope.

  (“I have got it into my head that I should maintain a resolute idea and affirm a certain dignity that a man ought to possess, with which, believe me, I am not very content.”) In Ortega’s opinion, Goya understood the opposition between the idea and the plebeian and would never again live completely in either of those worlds. In fact, just the opposite occurred, because Goya was a man of moral syntheses. The public festivities at El Capricho revealed to him both the complexity of the real world in its human dimension, and the invalidity of any effort to apprehend it directly in art. Only by means of an increasingly deep and deceptive labyrinth would he be able to approach his fellow humans after this carnival, which was the last fiesta of a doomed era.

  The commissions for cartoons for tapestries wearied him, precisely because the reality that needed to be expressed in those models was completely spurious in its pretended simplicity. He delayed work on the requests or tried to avoid it altogether. When he presented a preliminary sketch as detailed as the one for The Meadow of San Isidro, he knew very well that if it were transferred to a large cloth, they would never be able to weave the copy. An infuriated director of the Royal Factory wrote a long letter of condemnation to the minister of finance. Ramón Bayeu avoided working on his obligations to Santa Bárbara with the excuse of some portraits of the Infantes. “Goya, on the other hand, is entirely free and his attitude is as strange as it is irregular.” He claimed that his appointment as court painter exempted him from all involvement in the manufacture of tapestries, because the salary of fifteen thousand reales did not include payment for the cartoons he made for the Factory. In the meantime, the weavers had no work because of those reckless artists. Many had to be discharged and found themselves living in dire poverty.

  Goya’s arrogance angered the minister, and the dispute became rancorous. The older Bayeu intervened in favor of his brother-in-law, and probably the duchess of Osuna herself was not removed from the search for a settlement, which the painter’s obstinacy made increasingly difficult. Finally, a kind of tacit agreement was reached, under which Goya presented a final cartoon, Blind Man’s Bluff, which the duchess would buy from the Royal Factory once it was woven. After giving in, Goya humbled himself and wrote a contrite letter to Francisco Bayeu. “The truth is, I very much regret that our relationship has changed and I ask God to free me from this pride that always overpowers me on such occasions. If I can remain moderate, if I learn to not let myself be carried away by my impulses, my actions will be less deserving of censure from now on.”

  Blind Man’s Bluff, said Antonina Vallentin, was like a music box in which the hours of a dead century were struck. José López-Rey noted influences of Antonio Palomino in Goya’s final cartoon. A century and a half before Oscar Wilde, López-Rey underscores Palomino’s Museo Pictórico: “Just as Art is carefully diligent in imitating Nature, Nature too, rollicking in its works, endeavors to imitate Art.” This same López-Rey gleaned a distinction Palomino made with regard to painting landscapes: those in which the story is subject to the nation and those in which the nation is subject to the story. In all his cartoons, and especially in Blind Man’s Bluff, Goya decidedly favored the second. At the same time, and with notable fidelity, he followed the advice of the theoretician in his treatment of nature. “It is better to observe moderation in breezes (which are streaks) so that they do not offend the story and not to allow horizons to be too shrill and to keep them at the height of the perspective point you have or are considering in the story, figure, or floor you have; and the same moderation in the ground, mountains, and groves, endeavoring to have them help and not offend the principal part.” Finally, and coinciding with a practice expounded in the epilogue of Museo Pictórico, Goya covered his painting with a light coat of varnish before applying the last brushstrokes in order to make them more brilliant.

  Next to a pond an acacia is growing, as if the light of the Castilian spring were almost always Goya’s favorite for his cartoons. Behind the water the slopes of some hills undulate, purple and gray with an occasional green shrub. More distant, on the same horizon, the mountains turn blue in the afternoon. Whitish streaks run down the long mountainsides, confusing the distance. It is probably May, as in The Meadow of San Isidro, but all the snow has not yet melted on the crags. The sky is high and very clear above the clouds that the wind flashes at intervals over the profile of the mountains. In the foreground appear some broken rocks and a triangle of grass is sprouting, bordered by plants and resembling a carpet.

  At the edge of the pond four women and five men play at blind man’s bluff. Their youth, almost their adolescence, is evident, although one of the gentlemen wears a wig powdered gray. He is also the only one wearing a long jacket with epaulets and a buttoned vest. His companions are dressed in the festive attire of majos: very tight breeches embroidered on the legs, short bolero jackets with tassels, and glossy blue stockings. They wear slippers secured with large silver buckles and gather their hair into nets adorned with combs and loops. Two of the ladies at opposite sides of the circle are wrapped in the white tulle of fashions popularized by Señora de Osuna and resembling the dress of the duchess herself in the family’s painting signed by Goya. Another, wearing a satin doublet, perhaps part of a hunting costume, has on a wide-brimmed black hat adorned with pheasant feathers. Across from her, her back to us and facing the pond, is a maja, very young to judge by her figure and height, who seems to occupy the exact center of the picture, although in reality she is to the left. The deception comes from the color of her bolero jacket, as red as recently spilled blood, in contrast to the restrained hues of the rest of the group.

  A young man, his tight clothing spangled with green sequins and his eyes covered, occupies the center of the circle and brandishes a long wooden spoon. The painting stops at the precise moment the man leans forward and tests the air with his spoon, while one of the ladies in white and another gentleman with his knee on the ground attempt to avoid it. An instant before, or for that matter a few instants later (one of those moments of the gallant Rococo in its long days of festivities) the figures will dance, holding hands, from right to left in the direction of the hands of a clock where the final hours of an era are tinkling.

  It seems evident that all the protagonists in Blind Man’s Bluff are wearing brand-new, made-to-measure costumes. They are golden scoundrels, as we would say now, dressed like the authentic canaille on pilgrimage mornings at the miraculous fountain. They wear masks for their own pleasure or to serve as models for the artist. In any case they play at being actors in a farce they haven’t learned very well, which perhaps neither they nor Goya understand clearly yet. Their real condition as actors in the theater of a century reveals the artificiality of the landscape. Don Quijote had transformed Castilian horizons and places into the lands of his fantasy. In the background of some of his equestrian portraits, Velázquez painted not the panorama of the Casa de Campo but a tapestry that copies its skies and forests. The acacia, the pond, the mountai
ns, the grass, and the clouds are a frame for the game and the dance with the spoon: a cartoon inside the cartoon, arranged like a trompe l’oeil, because at first glance one would say that the landscape represented there, not its painting on a background canvas, resembled the sets of one-act farces.

  “Goya Far from his Subjects” is the title Ortega gives to one of the chapters in his unfinished book on the artist. August Mayer, in turn, notes that the cartoons, including Blind Man’s Bluff, lack a protagonist. A goldsmith has no reason to be impassioned, declares Ortega. There is no doubt that at this time Goya was much more interested in the meaning of the period than in many of his models. Later, in his deafness, he approached his figures instinctively, as if he had begun to lose his sight instead of his hearing. Meanwhile, in this final commission for the Royal Factory, Goya removed himself from the nine dancers until he saw them as very similar to dolls or puppets. Without judging them he stripped them in his own way, and in his own way he also participated as a spectator in their frivolous game. After all, as Goya himself wrote to Zapater during this time, for the few days we have to live, we should live as well as we can.