Artand Living
6564
2006 Issue 3
artist profile
D
uring his lifetime,Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (born in asmall Aragonese village,Fuendetodos in 1746) went from beingone of eighteenth and nineteenth centurySpain’s most popular portraitists to a widely-revered progenitor of modern art.Despite his posi- tion as a commissioned portraitist for the wealthy and the noble during hiscareer—both before and after being officially named as painter to the kingCarlos IV in 1786—flashes of Goya’sindividuali- ty and his tendency to break with the conven- tions of the artistic strictures of his time can beseen again and again in the broad spread of hisoeuvre showing permanentlythroughout theMuseo del Prado.The artist’s darker work,pro-duced after he reached middle age,wouldbecome a key inspiration for later movementslike Expressionism and Surrealism.Of Goya’s life,one thing is certain:he lived in trying times.In late eighteenth century Spain,thefanaticism of the Spanish Inquisition was subsuming the forward-thinking ideas of the Enlightenment that had been so fuelling intellectual life through-out Europe at the time;hate,suspicion andignominywithin the more conservative sections of the elite began to grow.Adirect indication of these harrowing timescomes from Goya’s famous etching,
¡Lo que puedeun sastre!,1797-98 (What a tailor can do!)
from his Caprichos series,displayed on the second floor of the Prado.What appears to be a monk towers over a youngwoman on her knees.However,on closer examination,the towering oppressor is simply a tree draped with a habit.The image suggests the essential emptinessof the ecclesiastical tyranny at this time but also hints at the power of its out-ward symbolism alone.The message seems to be:dress up anything as a power-ful figure and the innocent will kneel before it.In this etching,we can see where writer Jean-Claude Carrière may havefound inspiration for the plot of Goya’s Ghosts,which follows the events sur-rounding the reinstated Inquisition’spersecution of Goya’syoung muse Ines (played byNataliePortman) for heresy despite Goya’s(StellanSkarsgård) pleas to friend and inquisition-spear-header Brother Lorenzo(played byJavier Bardem).Goya is believed to have suffered something of anervous breakdown between 1792 and 1793,when a mental and physical deterioration nearly killed him and caused him to go deaf.Another debilitating illness struck him in 1819,bringing himclose to death for a second time.The title and thedisturbing content of another of Goya’s etchingsfrom this tortured period also on show on the sec-ond floor of the Prado,
El sueño de razon producemonstruos
,1797 – 98 (The Sleep of reason pro-duces monsters) suggests the forces plaguing theartist’s beleaguered mind.Directlyabove the rear Murillo entrance of thebuilding,Salas 36-38 of the Prado are home to
Goya’sPinturas Negras (Black Paintings)
,transferred to canvas from the walls of the artist’sQuinta del Sordo residence (“The country house of the deaf man”) near Madrid,inwhich he lived between 1820 and 1823.In these works,Goyabrokefrom almost
Beyond
Goya’s Ghosts
This fall,filmmaker Miloˆ Forman brings
Goya’s Ghosts
to the big screen,taking the extraordinary historical and per-sonal circumstances surrounding the life of vaunted Spanish master Francisco de Goya and imagining the kind of events that could have shaped the artist,his work and his changing outlook on the world in which he found himself.
Art and Living
’s Andy Johnson took a stroll through the galleries of Madrid’s Museo del Prado—which house one of the world’smost extensive collections of the artist’s works—in order to sort out the real Goya:the man,the myth and,most of all,the painter.Here’s what he discovered.
The Great He-Goat or Witches Sabbath
,c.1820 – 23,Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 – 1828),Oil mural passed to canvas,Madrid,Museo del Prado
The Family of Charles IV,
1800 – 1801,Francisco José de GoyayLucientes(1746 – 1828),Oil on Canvas,Madrid,Museo del Prado
Naked Maja
,1797 – 1800,Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 – 1828),Oil on canvas,Madrid,Museo del Prado
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