Old Man Goya
Page 17
Javier and Mariano busied themselves with the money they had inherited and bit by bit it was eaten up, mostly in railway speculations and property deals. Goya’s work was sold piecemeal and Murray’s 1834 Handbook for Travellers in Spain mentions that ‘those who admire him should visit his son Don Javier (9, Street of the Waters) who has many of his father’s sketches and paintings’, implying that acquisitions were easy to arrange. Javier died in 1854 and when Mariano died twenty years later, he was not in possession of any examples of his grandfather’s work.
For a long time Goya was left undisturbed in the Chartreuse Cemetery in Bordeaux. The grave was overgrown and the iron railings that surrounded it were broken. In 1869 there was talk of bringing the artist home to Spain, but this came to nothing and it was not until October 1888 that the plans for an exhumation finally went ahead.
A witness described watching how the stone was unsealed and removed. The gravedigger entered the vault. The wooden coffins belonging to Goya and Javier’s father-in-law had disintegrated completely, but the remains of two skeletons could be seen scattered on the earth. One belonged to a small man and the other to a giant with a strong, arched backbone, enormous shinbones and no head.
Now in my thoughts I find myself standing in that curiously suburban cemetery, the little houses for the dead stretched out in careful avenues. The air is cold and the sky is grey and empty, but there is no rain. I am leaning against a broken metal railing and looking down at the two skeletons that have just been uncovered. I recognise Goya at once because his short and stocky figure is so very familiar to me, but someone standing close beside me says that he is obviously the giant without a head; everyone knows what a big frame he had and you can see how the spine was curved from years of being hunched over his work. And then he points to fragments of the brown cape of Saint Francis of Paola clinging to the old bones and I know that he is right and this is my man.
I wonder about the absence of the head. The two French doctors who were probably with him at the end were both anatomists and had done research on what could be learnt from the structure of the human brain and the shape of the skull. They must have taken Goya’s head away with them on the night after he died in order to find out what secrets it held about the nature of greatness. And then he was buried so quickly that there was no time to return the head to him. Not that I think he would have minded.
After the exhumation the bones were placed in a box and taken to the mortuary to await further instructions. A year and a day later, when nothing had happened, they were returned to their original grave. There they stayed for a further ten years when they were again exhumed and taken to Madrid. For a while they lay in the cemetery of San Isidoro with a view out across the river and towards the hill where the House of the Deaf Man had once stood, and then they were transferred to their final resting place under the marble floor in the church of San Antonio de la Florida. If Goya had opened his eyes to look up, he would have seen the domed ceiling he painted in 1798. The figure of the saint has just brought a dead man to life, but the crowd of people who have gathered here are so busy with each other that only a few of them have noticed the miraculous transformation that is taking place. You can almost hear the noisy babble of their talk and laughter.
(illustration credit 41.2)
List of illustrations
1.1 Caprichos 31, Ruega por ella
5.1 Caprichos 1, Autorretrato
8.1 Caprichos 23, Aquella polvos
11.1 Disparates 11, Disparate pobre
12.1 Caprichos 35, Les descañona
14.1 Caprichos 61, volaverunt
15.1 Caprichos 63, !Miren que graves!
17.1 Caprichos 41, Ni mas ni menos
18.1 Desastres de la Guerra 48, !Cruel lástima!
19.1 Desastres de la Guerra 3, Lo mismo
20.1 Desastres de la Guerra 36, Tampoco
21.1 Desastres de la Guerra 64, Carretadas al cementerio
22.1 Caprichos 53 !Que pico de oro!
24.1 Tauromaquia 20, Ligereza y atrevimiento …
26.1 Caprichos 60, Ensayos
27.1 Disparates 10, Caballo raptor
28.1 Caprichos 7, Ni así la distinguee
33.1 Caprichos 26, Tienen asiento
35.1 Disparates 12, Disparate alegre
36.1 Disparates 8, Los ensacados
40.1 Tauromaquia 15, El famoso Martincho …
41.1 Caprichos 32, Porque fur sensible
41.2 Disparates 13, Modo de volar
The author and publisher are grateful to Calcografía Nacional, Madrid, for kind permission to reproduce these photographs of the copperplates.
Select Bibliography
My primary source of biographical information has been Pierre Gassier, Juliet Wilson and François Lachenal, Goya: Life and Work (Paris, 1971; Cologne, 1994). With regard to the final years in Bordeaux and especially Goya’s relationship with Leocadia and the events surrounding his death, I am indebted to the fascinating and detailed picture given in Jacques Fauqué and Ramon Villanueva Etcheverria, Goya y Burdeos (Trilingual edition, Zaragoza, 1982). Jan Read’s Account of the Peninsular War (London, 1978), was especially useful and provided references to the narratives of individual soldiers. Robert Southey’s two volumes of Letters Written During a Journey in Spain and a Short Residency in Portugal (London, 1808) and Théophile Gauthier’s A Romantic in Spain (English translation, New York, 1926) were the most vivid sources for the description of the countryside and way of life. It is from Gauthier that I took the idea of shaved mules looking like enormous mice and the woman in an inn breastfeeding a puppy. The deaf poet David Wright, who was also a family friend, wrote a moving account of his condition, Deafness (London, 1969).
Almost all of the letters quoted here are taken from Francisco de Goya Diplomatario (ed. Angel Canellas Lopez, Zaragoza, 1981), the translations of which are my own. The exceptions are the legal documents relating to Goya’s time of exile in France, which come from Goya y Burdeos, and the one letter from Goya to Leocadia which appears, in translation only, in The Burlington Magazine (Eric Young, ‘An unpublished letter from Goya’s old age’, 1972, pp. 558–9).
Other sources include:
Juan G. Atienza, Fiesta Populares e Insulatas (Barcelona, 1997)
Major-General Lord Blaney, Narrative of a Forced Journey Through Spain and France as a Prisoner of War in the Years 1810 to 1814 (London, 1814)
Edward Costello, ed. Anthony Brett-James, The Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns (London, 1967)
Pierre Gassier, Francisco Goya: The Complete Albums (New York, 1973)
Nigel Glendinning, Goya and his Critics (Yale University Press, 1977)
——Goya’s Country House in Madrid: The Quinta del Sordo (Apollo, vol. 123, 1986, pp. 102–9)
Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud, Goya: The Phantasmal Visions (Guillaud Editions, 1987)
Tomas Harris, Goya: Engravings and Lithographs (Oxford, 1963)
Martin Hume, Modern Spain, 1788–1898 (London, 1900)
José Lopez-Rey, Goya and his Pupil Maria del Rosario Weiss (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1959)
Laurent Matheron, Goya (Bordeaux, 1857)
Priscilla Muller, Goya’s Black Paintings (New York, 1984)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Goya Hommages: Les Années Bordelaises 1824–1828 (catalogue, 1998)
National Gallery, William B. Jordan and Peter Cherry, Spanish Still Life: From Velasquez to Goya (National Gallery Publications, 1995)
Charles Poore, Goya (Scribners, 1938)
Royal Academy, Goya, Truth and Fantasy (catalogue, 1994)
Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (London, 1991)
A.L.F. Schaumann, On the Road with Wellington: The Diary of A War Commissary in the Peninsular Campaign (London, 1924)
Robert Sencourt, Spain’s Uncertain Crown (London, 1932)
Victory I. Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch, Goya: The Last Carnival (Reaktion Books, 1999)
Sarah Symmons, Goya (London, 1998)
Janis Tomlin
son, Francisco Goya y Lucientes 1746–1828 (London, 1994)
Antonina Vallentin, This I Saw: The Life and Times of Goya (London, 1951)
Susann Waldermann, Goya and the Duchess of Alba (London, 1998)
Rev. George Downing Wittington, Travels Through Spain and Portugal (London, 1808)
Acknowledgements
Bernard Cornwell recommended a list of fascinating and obscure books on the Peninsular War. Nigel Glendinning gave me some invaluable suggestions about where to begin with my researches and Sarah Symmons kindly read through the completed manuscript and offered helpful advice and insights. José Juan Chans Pousada, the Vice Director at the Estación Biológica de Doñana in Andalusia, and Audry Ozola, the Director of the Instituto Cervantes, Casa de Goya in Bordeaux, were both welcoming and informative. Much thanks is also due to my agent, Toby Eady, and to my two editors, Dan Franklin in London and Dan Frank in New York. In 1999, the Society of Authors kindly gave me a Travelling Scholarship which I used on my travels.
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