April 2007 MGA 301

MUSIC HISTORY assignment

Historical and Artistic

Lecturer: Rudi Bower

Content

1. An Introduction

2. Goya, the man

3. Historical backround: France and Spain

4. Portraiture

5. Further details on the life of Goya amongst the awakening

6. Goya and his artworks

7. 1799 War

8. Conclusion

9. Appendix 1 and 2: examples of artworks by Goya

10. Appendix 3: Biographical outline

[Link]
 Francisco GOYA

Behind the art of Terror and Splendour

“Goya, nightmare full of things unknown,

- Charles Baudelaire
The Flowers of Evil (1857)

Francisco Goya was born on 30 March 1746 at Fuendetodos, a small village in Spain. One

of five children, his first commission, at the age of sixteen years, was to decorate a religious

cabinet in the local church. It was not until he was twenty four years old that he would depart for

Italy in search of success at the academics.

Historical backround:

At the end of the eighteenth century, the French middle classes were on the verge of

attaining a long pursued goal: under repeated blows, the much hated and envied monarchy had

had its foundations shaken and was about to be eliminated. The Revolution was being prepared

and rallied the support of the masses against the common authority. The bourgeoisie vigorously

denounced the luxury of the upper class. This emotional vortex was expressed in the art of the

time, on an unconscious yet striking level. The bourgeoisie practiced the Roman virtues, those of

the Republic, because they echoed virtues of its own. Soon the facades of bourgeois houses were

to set a new trend toward severity. The massive stone buildings, with their severe proportions, the

elimination of ornament, the smooth, bare surfaces, embodied the new spirit in society.
Goya, the man:

Goya’s early life was seen as a tempestuous youth living a bohemian existence. He

described himself in letters to a childhood friend, Martin Zapater: “In my day I knew how to fight

bulls and, sword in hand, feared no one.” In his painting ‘ La Novillada’ (a bullfight with young bulls)

Goya actually portrayed himself as a bullfighter, tall, strong, muscular. (Baticle:46)

Goya, now in Madrid, Spain, wrote another letter to Zapater in 1775 revealing a Goya who

was impulsive, humorous, sometimes crude, always financially interested; money featured large in

his concerns. Goya disliked being in debt and was scrupulous about repaying what he owed

others.

When looking at other letters sent by Goya to Zapater we see an endearing personality

emerging, a portrait of a complete man, with passions and failings, generous, enthusiastic, full of

insight and a tremendous love of life.

Goya received his first royal commissions in 1775. They were cartoons for a set of

tapestries for the dining room of the Prince of Asturias (the future Charles IV) in the Escorial. Even

through he was paid 8000 reals for the work, he was bored at having his talent restricted in textiles,

yet, each shows qualities that are essentially painterly: a sense of space, of light, the realism of

social types, attitudes and costumes, skilful composition, warmth and colour.

According to Beckett (1994:103), Goya possessed two outstanding gifts: He could pierce

through the external façade of any sitter, to unmask the interior truth (a gift dangerous for any but
the clever artist). He combined with it a marvelous decorative sense. His work has such beauty that

even those who had been caricatured in his portraits seem not to have grasped what had

happened, being overwhelmed by the wonder of the paint. In every portrait, Goya puts his finger on

the living pulse of the sitter. He does so with such intensity of power that we need the decorative

qualities to offset the impact.

Continuing the story of his life, Goya was now in his thirties. The talented son of a

craftsman and an illiterate countrywoman, he was now entering a remarkable social circle, very

different from the court. This was the world of the ilustrados, “enlightened” historians, thinkers,

economists, writers, who discussed problems of great interest and moment, and sought to fight

against the traditional ills of Spain. These men taught him to think and give form to his ideas, to see

the complexity of human life. He had built up a capital of 100,000 reals (a gardener earned at the

most 350 reals per year). Materially secure, professionally acclaimed, Goya anticipated a

promising future.

Portraiture:

Portraiture played an important role in Goya’s work, enabling him to study the character

and temperament of each of his models with minute scrutiny. He has left us an astonishing

collection which, in its systematic observation, has the psychological range and insight found in the

novels of Balzac or Dickens. In 1783 Goya wrote telling Zapater that he was coming back from

Arenas de San Pedro exhausted: “His Highness behaved very graciously, I painted his portrait, his

wife’s, the little boy’s and the little girl’s with unexpected success, four others painters did not

succeed.” His host gave him 1000 douros (20,000 reals) and a dressing gown for his wife, covered

in silver and gold, that was said to be worth 30,000 reals. (Baticle, 1986:146) In his forties Goya
achieved total freedom of expression. The fruit of relentless effort and the desirel to conquer his

weak points.

Further details on the life of Goya amongst the awakening of war:

In the year 1789 history intervened in Goya’s life. On 5 May the States-General met in

France: they were to uncover all the evils of old Europe. The beginnings of the French Revolution,

news of which was not allowed to reach the Spanish people, worried the government and Court in

Madrid. Within a short while, the French king Louis XVI, completely overtaken by events, sent a

desperate secret appeal to his first cousin Charles IV of Spain. Far removed from all this, elated by

his recent promotion, Goya painted a series of portraits of Charles IV and queen Maria Luisa. In

August 1792, with the King of France now dethroned and imprisoned, Spain feared that the war

already declared by the French Republic on the German Empire might reach the Iberian peninsula.

In January 1793 Louis XVI was guillotined and France did indeed declare war on Spain. Although

little is known of Goya’s life in 1792, the political disturbance of the Court caused by events in

France and the fall of several of his protectors must have disrupted his career.

Goya made his living by working for royalty and the establishment, and his political views

appear confused, perhaps purposely. His art suggests a stubborn independence, and perhaps his

greatest painting was a version of a French war crime, the shooting of hostages after the Spanish

people rose against Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule in 1808. ‘ The Third of May 1808’ was painted six

years after the event it portrays. It is not the French that Goya condemns but our communal

cruelty. It is humankind that holds the rifles. The victims, too, are the everyday man, the huddled

mass of the poor who have no defender. Goya makes the onlooker feel that he is both the

executioner and the executed, as if the potential for good or evil is in us all.
 In 1793 Goya wrote telling Zapeter that he had been in bed for two months. He had been

seized with paralysis, (apparently a type of meningitis) which left him incurably deaf; a terrible

affliction for an outgoing man who loved field sports. He reacted by continuing to work. In summer

1793 he returned to Madrid.

“I am the same as ever; as afar as my health goes, sometimes I feel furious, in that
I can hardly put up with my temper, sometimes I feel calmer, as when writing to
you now. But I’m already feeling tired: all I can say is that on Monday, God
willing, I am going to a bullfight, and I would have liked you to come with me.”
- Letter to Zapater
Baticle (1986:156)

It is the nature of great works to communicate at a universal level in exposing the flaws of

society. Goya’s talent as an etcher was so rare, so original, his imagination so vigorous, his

technique so skilled, and his artistic expression giving social criticism. His subjects included

prostitution, superstition, the Inquisition, unbridled ambition, the abuse of power. His ideas were

always transformed into tremendously vital images.

1799 War

In France came 18 Brumaire (the second month of the Republican calendar) 1799, Bonaparte’s

coup d’etat. His sights were set on the Imperial throne, and depotism gradually spread over

Europe. Goya, while retaining his clear realistic vision of the world around him, broke free from

political and ideological groups. At the end of 1800 Godoy regained political control, while Lucien

Bonaparte was sent to Madrid as French ambassador.

Goya’s abiding philosophy: never underestimate the importance of money. He knew that

artistic freedom depended on financial independence: that alone enabled him to express himself as

he wished, not as others wished. His private wealth, accumulated by work, and his business

contacts allowed him to survive political crisis. These contacts also gave him a broader view of life
than was found in the limited world of the Court.

“As far as I’m concerned, all I can say is that I always work with the same
seriousness on whatever I want, without having to accommodate any enemy,
without being subject to anyone: I don’t want to dance attendance on anyone.”
- Letter to Zapater
Baticle (1986:162)

On October 1805 at Trafalgar, Spain, ally of France, lost its armada. French bankers

financially involved in Spain, suffered bankruptcies, and the emperor Napoleon brought on the ruin

of the Spanish treasury. Worst of all, he was determined to rid Europe of the last reigning Bourbons

and place his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. The Spanish people knew little of the political

upheavals. They so hated Godoy that Napoleon was seen as a savior. When the French invaded in

December 1807 they were at first welcomed by the Spanish. By the end of April 1808 the Spanish

people realized that Napoleon had come not to liberate, but to conquer. The people were enraged

to hear that the last Bourbons had been forced to leave Madrid and were being held captive by the

French. For the next six years the Spanish who were fiercely patriotic waged guerilla warfare

against the invader. In these years of warfare, with the English, Spanish and French bringing death

and famine daily, Goya was inspired to paint. Goya’s ‘ Disasters of War’, express the horrors of war

and the suffering it gave its innocent victims. A man of feeling, Goya did not passively suffer but

used his talent to protest, the violence of the oppressor found expression in the violence of his art.

“They are only hanged men, heaps of dead bodies that get stripped, women
that get raped, prisoners that get shot, converts that get robbed, populations that
flee, families reduced to begging, patriots that get strangled…”
-Theophile Gautier ‘Wanderings in Spain’
Myers (1964:96)

Baticle (1986:179) says of Goya’s work: “Like Picasso in ‘Guernica’, Goya avoids the

narrative style. Driven by a sort of mystic force, a steely resolve to avenge the victims of war
crimes, he sought by means of his brush to make audible oppressed humanity’s cry of revolt,

giving universal significance to an episode that without him would never have had the same

resonance.”

In May 1814 Goya’s masterpieces were hastily hidden in the Academy of San Fernando

where they remained, unknown, until the King’s death in 1833. But Spain was ruined and

Ferdinand VII was financially ruined.

In May 1825 Goya became seriously ill again. Doctors diagnosed paralysis of the bladder

and a large tumour of the perineum. He recovered, lost no time getting back to work and produced

forty miniatures on ivory, at a stroke, “correcting nothing”. In 1826, he left France and found himself

back in Madrid. He was eighty years old, and had covered nine hundred kilometers in

uncomfortable conditions. In Goya’s own words: “I have no sight, no strength, no pen, no inkstand,

all is wanting, only my willpower is left me.” Beckett (1994:194). Goya died in April 1828 in his

apartment in Bordeaux. He was eighty-two years old and had spent thirty-five of those years deaf.

“The colours of Goya’s apparitions have no more raison d’etre that his paintings… he
foreshadows all modern art, because modern art begins with this freedom.”
- Andre Malraux,
Saturn, 1950
Goya and his paintings

“They shovel corpses into a pit, strip the dead, patch up the wounded, carry
off the corpses of famine. We stand even closer as men are hanged; we can see
their faces screw up, their tongues start from their heads. Men are spitted on
tree trunks, dismembered, strangled; all within touching distance of the viewer.”
- Williams (1976:212)

To find the truth, we must begin with the artist himself. As he scrutinizes the world and its

appearances the painter asks questions of it; his manner of representing the world is an

interpretation of the answers he has received. Through painting, man carries on a dialogue with the

visible world. A great work demands to be studied and contemplated until the submerged echo of

the life it communicates to us rises and resounds within us. A painter chooses from the objects he

sees in the outside world and they provide the outlet for his obsessions.

Goya drew his subjects from everyday life which seemed to inspire him with horror. The

bullfights that is Spain; the scenes of slaughter that is the French invasions, and the Spaniards’

resistance to it. There is blood over everything; men are shown being disemboweled by beasts or

by the ruthless sword of a soldier, or impaled upon trees. It is almost as if Goya tried to portray

what he was seeing happening to humanity in the world around him – human beings transformed

by war, into beasts. In the book Discovery of Art, Huyghe (1959:230) asks if Goya confined himself

merely to seeing this violent world, or did he shudder, feeling a beast awakening in his own depths

and stirring with a frightening affinity? In other worlds, was his art perhaps an inner reflection of

turmoil? In the painting ‘Murder of the Archbishop of Quebec’, 1811, a disemboweled body is being

eaten alive by naked, hairy cannibals. These sadistic scenes always take place in dark, mysterious

grottoes. When Goya placed himself in an infirmity in Casa del Sordo, he didn’t decorate the walls
with scenes of peace and light to relieve his isolation. Not at all; gloomier and deafer than ever, he

painted in blacks, whites and greens that were his favourite colours at the time. The sneering

blackened figures of witches, a black dog, a beast howling on a ridge in the wilderness; and finally

Saturn devouring his children.

Goya at first submitted to the conventions of the eighteenth century. He painted designs for

tapestry, depicting scenes from the life of the upper classes or of the common people. Later, in his

maturity he showed his works, and himself not only naked, but emotionally tattered. The events of

his time and certain historical happenings proved useful for flaunting in each of his works, the

obsessions that haunted him. He could not help revealing this abyss; it yawned even behind the

portraits he painted of the Spanish royal family. Goya showed the depths which remind man of his

animal origins, his terrible bestial stirrings. Cut off from the outside world by his deafness, he was

able to hear all the more clearly this interior madness.

In the words of the Spanish art critic Charles Baudelaire, Le Pre’sent, 1857:

“Goya is always a great artist, and often frightening. He has added something very much
more modern. He had a love of the indefinable, a feeling for violent contrasts, for what is
terrifying in nature, and for human features which have acquired animal-like qualities as a
result of their environment. All the orgies of the dreamworld, all the exaggerations of
hallucinatory images, and, in addition, all those slim, white Spanish girls, whom the
inevitable old hags wash and make ready for their coverns, or for the evening’s prostitution
– the Sabbath of civilization! Light and darkness, reason and the irrational are played
against each other in all these grotesque horrors. What an extraordinary sense of the
comic! It is difficult to say precisely at what point reality and fantasy are knitted together
and joined.
The chief merit of Goya lies in his ability to create credible monstrosities. His monsters
are viable, harmoniously proportioned. No one has dared to go further than he in the
direction of grotesque reality. All these contortions, bestial faces, and diabolical grimaces,
are profoundly human.”
Appendix 3:
Outline Biography of Goya
1746 Francisco Goya born at Fuentodos in the province of Saragossa, the son of Jose’
Goya, a gilder, and Gracia Lucientes.

1763 Goya goes to Madrid to compete for a place at the Royal Academy of San
Fernando. He fails to win one.

1769 Goya goes to Italy, studies in Rome.

1775 Marries Josefa Bayeu. He is commissioned by Antonio Rafael Mengs, Director of

1778 Gains an entry to the Royal Palace, and engraves a series of etchings from the
paintings of Lelasquez.

1783 Carries out his first official commission – the portrait of Floridablanca.

1784 By now Goya has become a fashionable society portrait painter. His son Xavier is
born. His altarpiece for the church of San Francisco el Grande is ceremonially
unveiled by the King.

1788 Charles III dies. Charles IV crowned.

1789 The beginnings of the French Revolution

1792 Towards the end of this year the illness occurs which is to change the nature of his
work, and which left him totally deaf. The King of France is dethroned and
imprisoned.

1793 France declares war on Spain

1800 A period of great activity. Many of the Royal portraits were done at this time.

1808 Charles IV abdicates, and the king and queen retreat to Boyonne. Murat’s troops
invade Madrid. Goya witnesses the executions of the 2 nd and 3rd of May.

1812 Death of his wife, Josefa. During the period 1808-1814 he has to pay lip service to
the Court of the French kin, Joseph Bonaparte.

1813 Ferdinand VII returns to Madrid. Goya is reinstated, but at times is in danger of
dismissal.
1814 Goya’s paintings are hidden in the Academy of San Fernado

1819 Buys a home outside Madrid. Haunted by the horrors he has seen, his drawings
become more tortured. He suffers another serious illness.

1826 Returns to Madrid and asks the king for indefinite leave.

1828 Dies

1900 His remains are removed from Bordeaux and placed in the shurch of San Antonio
de la Florida in Madrid.

References

Baticle, J. 1986. Goya: Painter of Terror and Splendour, edited by A. Arnold. 10 vols. London:
Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Beckett, W. 1994. Story of Painting, edited by Janice Lacock, Edward Bunting, Susannah
Steel. London: Dorling Kindersley.

Glendinning, N. 1977. Goya and his Critics. London: Yale University Press

Huyghe, R.1959. Discovery of Art, translated by Alexandra Campbell. London: Thames and
Hudson.

Myers,B. 1964. Goya. London: Spring books.

Thomas, H. 1972. Goya, The Third of May 1808. London: Aitken, Stone & Wylie Ltd.

Williams, G. 1976. Goya and the Impossible Revolution. London: Peters Fraser Dunlop Group
Ltd.
Appendix 1:

“Saturn devouring one of his Sons”

Oil on plaster, transferred to canvas.

Of all the nightmares portrayed on the walls

of the House of the deaf, terrifying in their

size, this is the most gruesome. Here Saturn

is shown as a silly old man who does not

seem to know what he is doing, a Lear-like

figure who destroys his own children out

of fear. It is an attack on bestiality and

ignorance.

‘Goya’, Myers (1964: XI)

Examples of facial sketches, etchings

Documents:
1819
1820

Baticle (1986:XVII)
‘Ya es Hora – It is time.’

‘Ya es hora. – It is time.’

‘Mucho hay que chupar. – There’s a lot to suck.’

‘El vergonzoso. The bashful one.’

‘Hasta la muerte. – Until death.’

‘Duendecitos. – Hobgoblins.’

‘Se repulen. – They spruce themselves up.’

‘Hilan Delgado. – They spin finely.’