A LONG-AWAITED exhibition of Francisco Goya’s paintings, drawings, etchings, and cartoons of women arrived in Washington this week. Long-awaited because of one woman in particular: the one shown in “The Naked Maja” and (in exactly the same pose) in “The Clothed Maja,” which until June will hang side-by-side in the National Gallery, just as they usually do in Madrid’s Prado museum. These “gentlemen’s paintings,” to use the two-century-old euphemism for pornography, were commissioned by the Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy around 1800.
They would have hung in Godoy’s private cabinet, where men would gather in the evenings. The Goya historian Fred Licht has speculated that “The Clothed Maja”–a less finished and (for reasons other than the clothing) less arresting work than the nude one–was used as a covering for the other, so those affronted by nudity could enter without being shocked. (Spanish painting is, as many art historians have remarked, not at all rich in female nudes.) The curators of the present exhibition go farther than Licht, speculating that the clothed painting could be pulled off of the nude one by means of pulleys.
What is even more interesting is the painting’s history. Godoy lost his office during the Napoleonic conquest. But once Napoleon was chased out of Spain in 1814, the painting fell into the hands of the Inquisition, as the morals police of the Catholic Church was then still called. Goya was identified as the painter, and summoned for questioning. Little else is known about the incident.
But the thought that passes through the mind of a visitor to the exhibit who learns this is: So how is it that we’re looking at that painting today? Those who have lived in the twentieth century assume that art objects that fall into the disfavor of authoritarian powers-that-be will meet with not just obloquy, but destruction. This is easily enough seen with Hitler (whose mobs would have burned the Maja) or Stalin (who would have sent it to some anonymous pulping mill). But it’s also true of less extremist authorities.
Take some of our politically correct ones. Imagine a painting as offensive to the sensibilities of, say, the Antioch College deans, or the Berkeley student body, or the Disney corporation as the Majas were to the Catholic hierarchy of post-Napoleonic Spain. What chances would you give it of surviving another 200 years?
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
