Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [56]
ART OF SOCIAL PROTEST. Goya was equally blunt in revealing the vices of church and state. His disgust with humanity followed a near-fatal illness in 1792 that left him totally deaf. During his recovery, isolated from society, he began to paint demons of his inner fantasy world, the start of a preoccupation with bizarre, grotesque creatures in his mature work.
A master graphic artist, Goya’s sixty-five etchings, “The Disasters of War” from 1810-14, are frank exposes of atrocities committed by both the French and Spanish armies during the invasion of Spain. With gory precision, he reduced scenes of barbarous torture to their horrifying basics. His gaze at human cruelty was unflinching: castrations, dismemberments, beheaded civilians impaled on bare trees, dehumanized soldiers staring indifferently at lynched corpses.
Goya, “Family of Charles IV,” 1800, Prado, Madrid. The Spanish monarchy was so vain and imbecilic they failed to notice that Goya portrayed them in all their ostentation.
“The Third of May, 1808” is Goya’s response to the slaughter of 5,000 Spanish civilians. The executions were reprisal for a revolt against the French army in which the Spaniards were condemned without regard to guilt or innocence. Those possessing a penknife or scissors (“bearing arms”) were marched before the firing squad in group lots.
The painting has the immediacy of photojournalism. Goya visited the scene and made sketches, and yet his departures from realism give it additional power. He lit the nocturnal scene with a lamp on the ground, casting a garish light. In the rear, the church is dark, as if the light of all humanity had been extinguished. Bloody carcasses project toward the viewer, with a line of victims stretching off in the distance. The immediate victims are the center of interest, with a white-shirted man throwing wide his arms in a defiant but helpless gesture recalling the crucified Christ. The acid shades and absence of color harmony underscore the event’s violence.
Goya, “The Third of May, 1808,” 1814-15, Prado, Madrid. Goya protested the brutality of war by individualizing the faces of the victims of the faceless firing squad. The poet Baudelaire praised Goya for “giving monstrosity the ring of truth.”
In other paintings of that time, warfare was always presented as a glorious pageant and soldiers as heroes. Goya contrasted the victims’ faces and despairing gestures with the faceless, automatonlike figures of the firing squad. Although deafness cut Goya off from humanity, he passionately communicates his strong feelings about the brutality and dehumanization of war.
LATE STYLE: BLACK PAINTINGS. Goya became obsessed with depicting the suffering caused by the political intrigue and decadence of the Spanish court and church. He disguised his repulsion with satire, however, such as in the disturbing “black paintings” he did on the walls of his villa, Quinta del Sordo (house of the deaf). The fourteen large murals in black, brown, and gray of 1820-22 present appalling monsters engaged in sinister acts. “Saturn Devouring His Children” portrays a voracious giant with glaring, lunatic eyes stuffing his son’s torn, headless body into his maw. Goya’s technique was as radical as his vision. At one point he executed frescoes with sponges, but his satiric paintings were done with broad, ferocious brushstrokes as blazing as the events portrayed.
Goya died in France, in self-imposed exile. He was the father of 20 children but left no followers. His genius was too unique and his sympathies too intense to duplicate.
ROMANTICISM: THE POWER OF PASSION
“Feeling is all!” the German writer Goethe proclaimed, a credo that sums up Romantic art. Rebelling against the Neoclassic period’s Age of Reason, the Romantic era of 1800-50 was the Age of Sensibility. Both writers and artists chose emotion and intuition over rational objectivity.