Francisco Goya y Lucientes was a mass of contradictions. He was a liberal, initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, who liked nothing better than to go hunting with successive absolutist monarchs of Spain. He was deputy director of the Royal Academy in Madrid, yet believed that traditional academic training was useless, insisting that ‘there are no rules in Painting’ and the ‘servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the Young’.
Goya was by disposition anticlerical, though he happily executed countless religious images designed to satisfy Spanish Catholic worshippers. These paintings are, frankly, rather soupy. That is not what we expect from Goya, who is usually seen as more loopy than soupy: this is the man who created the ‘Black Paintings’, Los Sueños, The Disasters of War, The Third of May 1808 and Los Caprichos. Yet, as this thorough and balanced biography shows, many of these works, so often hailed as startlingly ‘modern’, do not fairly represent the art of Goya or his personality and are probably misinterpreted. During his lifetime Goya was renowned for his religious pictures and his portraits, but we mostly prefer the works of a very different kind that he made for himself.
Goya suffered a severe illness in 1793, when he was forty-seven, that left him deaf. The experience is often said to have cursed him with nightmarish visions and a fear of mental illness. But he may not have been so damaged after all, Tomlinson suggests. Far from being some sort of unhinged recluse, Goya remained sociable, humorous and family-loving all his life. The Black Paintings (a title that only dates from the 20th century), for example, may have been intended simply to entertain visitors to the country house that he acquired in 1819.
Tomlinson explains that Goya painted them over straightforward landscape decorations on the walls there and that they were designed in the manner of the phantasmagoria shows that could be seen in contemporary Madrid. They were in a dark interior and were probably meant to make the visitor jump, which would have made calling on Goya for drinks a little like an unplanned visit to the house of horrors at a fairground. True, some are macabre: I inadvertently saw Saturn Devouring His Son in my early teens and it was a very unsettling thing to come across. But the others are nothing like as scary and several are obviously humorous, including the over-interpreted The Dog. Presiding over the whole scheme is a lovely portrait of Goya’s companion, Leocadia Weiss.
Read Full Article »
