Francisco de Goya is among the most difficult of painters to reckon with, frequently praised for virtues he may not have possessed. His royal portraits — in particular, his depiction of the grotesque, almost pinheaded Carlos III in hunting garb — are taken by some as denunciations of the degeneracy of the Spanish monarchy, an interpretation that squares poorly with Goya’s naked careerism and endless cozening of royal authorities. Some see him as a defender of enlightened values against a Spain mired in superstition and primitivism, but in Spain, there hardly was any Enlightenment to speak of, and his famous satirical engravings skewer fops and highbrows as well as the uncultivated masses. Even his genius admits a degree of skepticism: His proportions are rarely exact, his details are often perfunctory, and he seems incapable of depicting a figure on a chair or bed with any degree of naturalism.
And yet, even a layperson stepping into Room 067 of the Prado, which houses the so-called “black paintings” that decorated the walls of Goya’s country house, is aware of being in the presence of something irreducibly strange and magnificent in its horror. I have stood before them at least a half-dozen times, and before comparable masterpieces such as The Burial of the Sardine and the prints that make up the Disparates, the Caprichos, and The Disasters of War, never feeling that I have really grasped the vision they embody but equally convinced that they are among the truest and most consummate expressions of human perdition.
Goya was born in 1746 in Fuendetodos, a medieval village devoted to agriculture and ice production with about 300 inhabitants. Properly, he was a native of Zaragoza, but his mother, a descendant of the minor nobility, owned a house in the Aragonese countryside, and the family was apparently there to renovate it. Spain had no proper middle class in the 18th century. Law, taxation, and labor arrangements remained essentially as they had been in feudal times and, in many places, would not change until the eve of the Civil War. Still, his father and brother had a profession in a fairly large city, and the shrewdness in financial matters Goya showed throughout his life speaks of a youth passed teetering between affluence and penury. Records reveal an elegant address but also shared accommodations and forced sales of properties — as craftsmen, the Goyas were dependent on an uneven flow of commissions — and as young Francisco matured, he was tireless in securing work for himself, even if, at times, he had to sacrifice quality.
Europe’s fledgling art markets would not spread to Spain for another hundred years, and the best career path an artist could hope for came through patronage by the church or the nobility. One means of access was through the competitions periodically given by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Goya tried for one in 1763 but lost out to his friend Gregorio Ferro. He must have hoped for better luck the second time, since the institution’s deputy lieutenant was a family friend and fellow Zaragozan, Goya’s future brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu. Bayeu allegedly recused himself from the jury, but in good Spanish fashion, the first prize went to his younger brother, Ramon. Goya received no votes at all. He gave up and traveled to Rome in 1769, determined to further his education on his own dime.
Not much is known of his time there. A sketchbook discovered in the 1980s revealed a list of cities he visited and saw, but Goya’s account trailed off, in characteristic fashion, with the words, “and lots of others I don’t remember.” He is likely to have drawn nude models in Italy, something impossible in his home country. He rubbed elbows with other artists, Spanish, Italian, and French, and entered and lost another contest on the subject of Hannibal victorious, contemplating Italy for the first time from the Alps. But whereas the judges back in Madrid had criticized Goya’s highly personal style, the Italians praised his “easy handling of the brush” and averred that he would have taken first place “had his colors been closer to the truth and the composition to the subject.”
An odd blend of convention and fancy, this early painting offers glimpses of the splendors and enigmas of Goya’s mature work. His Hannibal is exquisitely muscled, but a small panniculus hangs down over his leather skirt, as though he’d gone on a crash diet before mounting his elephant. His pose and the somewhat vacant expression in his eyes give him a comical, drunken aspect. In the foreground, in tones reminiscent of Caravaggio, sits a man with the head of a bull. This is meant to be a symbol for the river Po, but Goya’s lifelong fascination with human-animal hybrids would suggest that the mongrel form as such interested him far more than stale iconography.
Through deft jockeying and untiring work, Goya eventually made it to Madrid, painting tapestry cartoons and rising to court painter at age 40. His life was full but not especially happy: Little is known about his marriage save that it produced six children, only one of whom outlived his parents. Success came early, but the price was constant drudgery, and the tiny world of artists and artisans was plagued by backbiting. Like most people in those days, Goya was frequently ill, and in 1792, he lost his hearing (experts have long alleged lead poisoning or syphilis, but recent research points to Susac’s syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder).
If Goya had died at 50 (a ripe old age in his era), I don’t imagine he’d be more than a footnote. There is skill, often brilliance, in the works produced before that age, but much of their radiance lies in the hints they give of the masterpieces that would succeed them. What constitutes the bridge between the ho-hum austerity of The Black Duchess and the bottomless despair of the condemned rebels in The Third of May, 1808 is a question dozens of writers on Goya have tried to ask. The latest of these, Janis A. Tomlinson, is unusually bashful in her Goya: A Portrait of the Artist. Her speculations on the meaning of his paintings and prints or the thematic relations between them fill no more than 10 or 15 pages. There is virtue in this: She does much to dispel the myth of Goya as a melancholy loner trapped in a soundless world of glum meditations and gives us a figure more believable and hence more baffling: a “campechano” (the English equivalent of which might be something like “good old boy”), a lover of hunting and course humor, a cunning businessman and caring father who virtually invented modern art with no apparent awareness of the significance of what he was doing.
As he aged, Goya’s virtuosity only grew. The loose brushwork, so often the consequence of rushed assignments or of inattention to details that didn’t interest him, developed a kind of independent life as it veered into abstraction. His ebullience recalls Theodore Gericault; his flat figures look forward to Edouard Manet. He was past middle age when he produced his great etchings, and he began experimenting with the new technique of lithography just before his death at 82. One of his last drawings, which shows a bearded, melancholy man walking forward with two canes, bears the title I’m Still Learning.
Goya has been called anti-clerical by Aldous Huxley, among others, but what is stunning in his work, especially the prints, is how he leaps over not only the parochial religion of his home country but also the reform-minded humanism of those opposed to it and into a future empty of hope or promise. Close to such figures of the Spanish Enlightenment as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, Goya reflects none of their faith in the power of reason. He is a portraitist of the masses: of black-clad maniacs shrieking praise to St. Isidro in a foretaste of the Belgian James Ensor, of murderers seemingly repulsed at their deeds but driven forward by mechanical brutality, of imbeciles gathered in a circle being lectured to by some satanic beast. His figures are often solitary — a man dismembered and hung in a tree, or, in one of his spectral miniatures on ivory, a brute gnawing on a leek — but the ignorance and cruelty that envelope them are the condition of humanity as a whole.
When I look at his late pieces, especially the “black paintings,” I often think of Martin Heidegger’s assertion, “Only a god can save us now.” For the dog looking up over the quicksand, for the son devoured by Saturn, this god has long since failed to arrive. What persists is the darkness, the clouds casting dust-covered shadows, the two rivals clubbing each other endlessly in the head, buried to their knees in grain.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
