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Goya Triumphant
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16372 |
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THE ARTS
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5 / 1989 |
2,840 Words |
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Jason Edward Kaufman
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In the history of art it is impossible to name a man whose legacy is more comprehensive in its purview that that of Don Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), the great Spanish painter known to the world simply as "Goya." Nor can one easily find a man of such penetrating vision. Other painters may have achieved greater aesthetic perfection--Goya could not paint a physique like Michelangelo, nor a pose like Raphael, or render natural environments with encyclopedic thoroughness and geographic specificity but--none has recorded the tenor of his civilization with greater perspicacity and range.
If a single theme unifies Goya's multifarious subjects, it is Truth. He depicted the world in such a way that its deceptions were rendered apparent. No class or profession was exempt from his scrutiny, whether royalty, clergy, or peasantry, Goya's images railed against social injustice, deception, ignorance, folly, and vice, distilling from these satire as penetrating and condemning as any known. His imagery extended from the physical world into a continuous region of dream and fantasy that he employed to evoke the psychological agony of those who would deny Truth and reason. In this realm of the fantastic he was a pioneer. His images possess a dignity and an honesty that command our emotions and senses as do no other artists. But, more than denouncing falsehoods, injustices, and vices, Goya's pictures demonstrate that these maladies arise from within human nature itself, and even reason cannot dispel them entirely. Thus, his works are simultaneously topical and universal.
Tumultuous Epoch
Goya rose from humble beginnings to become the leading painter of his day, serving the courts of Kings Carlos III (reigned 1759-1788), Carlos IV (reigned 1788-1808), and Fernando VII (reigned 1808-1833). This tumultuous epoch witnessed the French Revolution, the Napoleonic conquest of Spain, the Spanish War of Independence (called the Peninsular war), and the Bourbon Restoration. Goya's career is inextricable from the shifting political and intellectual climate in which it evolved.
The phrase Age of Enlightenment refers to the period when eighteenth-century French writers and philosophers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire proposed that mankind could advance to perfection through the exercise of reason. These men systematically applied rational thought to reinterpret customs and concepts concerning the physical and spiritual worlds. Rationality itself was made the god for a new secular religion whose spirit and practice freed Goya to paint the Truth as he perceived it.
Many of Goya's friends and patrons were afrancesados, those whose sympathies accorded with the ideas of the enlightened French. These Spanish ilustrados (enlightened ones) founded economic and patriotic brotherhoods that aimed to establish more equitable and productive agricultural and industrial conditions throughout the country. These men participated in tertulias, evening soirees at which aesthetic and political ideas were cultivated and professional relationships established. They promoted legislation that would check the authority of the church and the Inquisition (which remained active into the nineteenth century). The greatest ambition of the ilustrados was to establish a constitutional monarchy that would invest a popularly elected parliament with legislative
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