Part 3

A century before the birth of Goya, Spanish painting had attained its crown of achievement in the work of the four great naturalists, Velazquez, Ribera, Zurbarán, and Murillo. Josef de Ribera (‘Lo Spagnoletto’), had succeeded Ribalta, and had given lasting expression to the realism which characterised Spanish art in the seventeenth century; Francisco de Zurbarán, the Estremaduran peasant, whom Lord Leighton called ‘All Spain,’ carried on the tradition of the elder Herrera in his passion for truth in detail and in the dramatic intensity of his expression; Murillo, the disciple of the Spanish Catholic Church, bewitched his generation with what Antonio Castillo y Saavedra described as his ‘wondrous grace and beauty of colouring’; and Velazquez, ‘our Velazquez,’ as Palomino proudly styled him, was the supreme painter through whom Spanish art became the light of a new artistic life.

Of Velazquez it has been said that he attained perfection in the realism of detail and in the realism of sight, and in his commanding genius Spanish art was emancipated from the fetters of pseudo-Italianism in which it had laboured so long. He carried Spanish realism to its Ultima Thule. Further his age could not go, and generations of artists who came after him devoted themselves to the imitation and reproduction of his colour and his technique with such passionate servility that in the end the copy of the pupil was frequently mistaken for the work of the master. The perfect technique of the great Court painter had, in his own day, the effect of arresting artistic development--it left his successors nothing to solve for themselves. He achieved so much in his own work that, for a time, the last word in art seemed to have been spoken. Until his influence had died away, the reproduction of Velazquez was the aim of the Madrid painters. For this reason, after the death of Velazquez, the artistic life of the seventeenth century became a spent force, and for want of new impetus of original genius, Spanish art steadily declined. The followers of the supreme painter failed to realise the true inwardness of his message. They had the seed, but they could raise no new flower. One feels towards the pictures of Velazquez as Swinburne felt towards the muse of Sappho:

’ ... earth’s womb has borne in vain New things, and never this best thing again; Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine, Seasons and songs but no song more like mine.’

But the reverent desire to perpetuate ‘this best thing’ could not arrest the decay of artistic inspiration. The disciples of Velazquez copied and painted successfully (up to a point), and they trained other generations of imitators who continued to work and teach their methods, until imitation slowly but surely sank into artistic degradation. Under the sway of Mariana of Austria, the decay of Spanish painting was further hastened, and the ascendency of the facile, brilliant brush of Luca Giordano, under Charles II., dealt the death-blow to the realistic impulse that had carried the national school of the middle seventeenth century to the realisation of its utmost ambition.

The decadence which followed the death of Velazquez was most pronounced among the Castilian painters, but the empire of Giordano extended to the Provincial schools and completed the more gradual decline of art in Andalusia and Valencia. Seville was foredoomed to decadence as a school of painting, for its artists had taken Murillo as their model, and in servilely imitating the ‘Painter of the Conceptions,’ they emphasised his faults, exaggerated his unreality, and caricatured his affectations. The popular admiration of Murillo was all-powerful to hasten the general decline, and each year the artistic outgrowth of Andalusia became more enfeebled.

In the last months of the seventeenth century Charles II. died without issue and the art-loving Austrian dynasty was ended. The succeeding Bourbon sovereigns brought with them an art derived from France; they had no ambition to reanimate the native art of the country. Madrid became the only recognised art centre in Spain, and to Madrid, in 1761, came, at the invitation of Charles III., Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the Venetian fresco-painter, and the Saxon pedant, Anton Raphael Mengs. The Spanish painters who had rendered homage to the facile Giordano were caught by the glamour of the fantastic, insincere art of Tiepolo, while the dreary academic influence of Mengs--whose paintings are declared by Carl Justi to echo the last shadow of eclectic mannerism--made for all that is dull, exact, and lifeless in pictorial art. No great Spaniard arose to counteract the demoralising influence of these imported professors; it was realised in the studios of Madrid that the methods of the favoured aliens led to popularity and fortune; the Spanish artists followed the line of least resistance, nor desisted when they found that it carried them ever further from the tradition founded by Velazquez.

This art, dull but without dignity, showy but meaningless, was the reflex of the prevailing rottenness in the national life. During the reign of Charles III. a certain superficial decency was observed; the corruptness of Court life was kept out of sight; a general conspiracy of make-believe was maintained. But under Maria Luisa of Parma and Charles IV., the abomination of moral desolation in social, political and artistic life was complete and confessed. Manuel Godoy, afterwards Prince de la Paz, was Prime Minister of Spain, and the country was demoralised by dissolute courtiers and unscrupulous ministers, and drained by insatiable priests. But in the turmoil created by an aristocracy sunk in lasciviousness, a government steeped in corruption, and a commonalty beaten and bled into a state of nerveless resignation, was heard the echo of the revolutionary movement which was sweeping over Europe. The teaching of Goethe and Schiller, followed by the preaching of Rousseau, had taken concrete form in the butcheries of Robespierre and Danton; the movement had culminated in the personal supremacy of Napoleon Buonaparte.

The hopes of the Spanish nation were centred in the Crown Prince Ferdinand. Even as the First of the Tigers thought to exterminate Fear by killing a man, the Spaniards believed that the abdication of Charles IV. would make an end of misrule and give their country peace and prosperity. But the King hated his son, and inspired by the double purpose of defeating the ambition of the Crown Prince and punishing the disloyalty of his subjects, he laid his crown at the feet of the Emperor of the French, who bestowed it upon his brother, Joseph Buonaparte. The Spanish liberals made the alien king welcome, but the Spanish loyalists proved a constant thorn in the side of the usurper, and at the end of five years Joseph Buonaparte fled Madrid. Two years later the Prince of the Asturias returned to Spain to be crowned king as Ferdinand VII. Again the distressful country was plunged into the depths of retrogression, clericalism, and fanaticism. Spain was undergoing her fate.

The strong men of the troublous times of the eighteenth century were the revolutionaries and reformers, and, as was inevitable, they sprang from the people. Rousseau, Robespierre, Napoleon, these were the forces that directed the movement, the effect of which was to make itself felt from one end of Europe to the other. Goya was a revolutionary. He lived under four kings of Spain. He was elected a member of the Académia de San Fernando in the reign of Charles III.; Charles IV. appointed him _Pintor de Cámara del Rey_; he took the oath of allegiance to Joseph Buonaparte and painted the usurper’s portrait; Ferdinand VII., who declared that he had deserved death for his defection from the Bourbon cause, condemned the man but pardoned the artist and received him as a member of the new Court. Critical opinion condones Goya’s flexible patriotism by the fact that ‘it was a period of national disaster,’ and that ‘national calamity was not altered by these trivialities.’

Goya, we are reminded, was a revolutionary; he was also a pitiless, if quizzical, onlooker at the life of the Madrid Court. It was a simple matter to him to transfer his allegiance from the Bourbons to Joseph Buonaparte, and it was even more simple to welcome Ferdinand VII. to the throne. ‘What did such changes matter in years of irretrievable ruin?’ writes C. Gasquoine Hartley, in _A Record of Spanish Painting_. The question may be left for the individual to answer according to his own fancy. And if Goya was, as some will find, an opportunist, a political weathercock, and a moral Vicar of Bray, as an artist he was a great reformative force. Alternately an idealist and a realist, he fought with all the social forces and against the academic standards of the school commanded by David and Mengs, destroying the debased conventions of painting and freeing the brush from the domination of a clique. A national artist _par excellence_, he gave lasting form to the sentiments, customs and conditions of his country. A profound believer in empiricism, a great humourist, sometimes impetuous and fantastic, at other times holding fast to reality; a master of portraiture; fantastic, inspired, spontaneous in his aquafortis etchings; he seized upon and immortalised every aspect of the gruesome tragi-comedy which was played in Spain in the last years of the eighteenth century.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born at the end of March (the 30th or 31st) 1746 at Fuentetodos near Zaragoza, in Aragon, the province which gave to the nation poets like the ‘Spanish Horaces,’ historians like Zurita, teachers like Gracián and Luzán, a scholar like Latassa, and a statesman like the Conde de Aranda. Goya was baptized in the Church of Our Lady of the Ascent, and the names given him by his godmother, Francesca de Grasa, were Francis Joseph. The amiable weakness for connecting great men with great families has prompted a German biographer to claim that both his father and mother belonged to the nobility, and that his first patron was the Duque de Fuentes. Less imaginative authorities, however, tell us that his parents, José Goya and Gracia Lucientes, were poor but hardworking peasants, and that when ‘the regenerator of the Spanish school of naturalistic painters’--to quote the prefatory note to Goya’s pictures in the Prado catalogue--had completed his course of elementary instruction at the hands of the village schoolmaster, he was put to agriculture. A fortunate accident revealed the bent of the lad’s genius and liberated him, at the age of fourteen, from the drudgery of manual labour.

M. Matheron relates that the lad had been sent with a sack of wheat to a neighbouring mill, when a monk of Zaragoza (probably Father Felix Salvador of the Carthusian convent of Aula Dei) happened upon him. Goya, seated on his burden, was intent upon drawing a pig with a piece of charcoal upon a whitewashed wall. The priest, struck by the correct free lines traced by the youngster, inquired who his master was and received the characteristic reply: ‘I have none, your reverence. It is not my fault, I cannot keep from drawing.’ The overmastering incentive pleaded by the youthful delinquent never forsook him, and, although powerful enemies resented his too free use of the pencil, and the Holy Inquisition was moved to curb his unwearied industry, he continued to ply brush and needle and gavel during sixty-eight years of changing, strenuous life. Father Salvador remained Goya’s friend until his death. He saw his father, and obtained permission from him, in 1760, for the lad to go to Zaragoza. The imperial city exercised a powerful influence upon his art. There is always in his pictures, as one of his countrymen points out, the Zaragoza landscape, so rich in the contrasts of its splendid and vigorous vegetation, recalling the banks of the Genil or the Turia, while its limy hills and grey plains bring to the memory the vistas of Castile. The melancholy of the sky--pierced by the severe lines of innumerable towers and bounded by the austere distant rock--remind us that here the sun has not the same suggested warmth that supplied the rays for Murillo’s brush; that this is not the land of fancy but the land of genius, cold as the snow of the Moncayo, that adds beauty to the beautiful plants which produce not sweet odours but healing balsams.

Thanks to the friendly offices of Father Salvador, Goya was admitted to the studio of José Luzán y Martinez, whose religious and historical pictures bear evidence of soft fresh colouring. He attended, too, the school founded in 1714 by the sculptor Juan Ramirez, a pupil of the well-intentioned Gregoria de Mesa. In the studio of Martinez, Goya, who from the first betrayed his lifelong passion for realism, worked with untiring ardour, stimulated, it may be, by the industry of his co-pupils, José Beratón, Tómas Vallespin, and the Huesca jeweller, Antonio Martinez, who founded, in Madrid, the silversmith’s business which still bears his name. ‘In the schools of Zaragoza,’ says C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘he followed no conventional standards, and his continuous study was directed to the development of his exuberant individuality. To comprehend the truth, and afterwards to depict it, as it pleased his ever-varying fancy, this was his great aim. His utterance was inevitable and instinctive, the overflow of his dramatic, inexhaustible and vivid imagination.’

Goya’s exuberant, passionate temperament betrayed itself in other directions outside his art. He lived, as he worked, in a condition of unconventional, even arrogant independence. Many tales of the wild escapades of his youth are told. His revolutionary tendencies embroiled him in frequent altercations; thrice he is said to have fallen under the ban of the Inquisition. Zaragoza finally grew unsafe for him, and in 1766 he fled to Madrid. There are no discovered documents relating to his first years in Madrid, and his biographers, for the most part, preserve a discreet reticence concerning his mode of life in the capital. It is supposed that he copied Velazquez, and the pictures at the Casa de Campo, the seat of the Duque de Arcos. It has even been surmised that, through his friendship with Bayeu, he had the entrée to the royal palaces of La Zarzuela, Aranjuez, and the Escorial. Other writers favour the idea that he lived the life of a young revolutionary, and Richard Muther, in his monograph of the painter, pictures him ‘wild and passionate, an athlete in his physical strength,’ being ‘everywhere present when dancing or love-making, scuffling or stabbing, is going forward.’ The one outstanding fact, upon which most biographers are agreed, is that one morning he was found lying in the streets with a dagger in his back. This occurrence, supplemented, it is said, by his misfortune in again incurring the displeasure of the Inquisition--some hold that he was placed under police supervision--made him once more seek safety in flight. He had a will to visit Rome, but no money to defray his travelling expenses. Tradition declares that he joined himself to a company of bull-fighters, worked his way to the coast as a picador, and set sail for Italy.

Iriarte is the authority for most of the details concerning this period of Goya’s career. French writers declare that the painter remained in Italy from 1769 to 1774. There is a full-length likeness of Pope Benedict XIV. still in the Vatican which is said to have been painted by Goya in a few hours, but as that pontiff died in 1756 there is much reason to doubt the truth of the legend.

The Conde de la Viñaza in his _Life_ of Goya refutes every detail of this story. It is said that while Goya was in Italy he secured a prize offered by the Parma Academy of Fine Arts for a picture of ‘Hannibal surveying Rome from a pinnacle of the Alps,’ but the Conde maintains that Goya at this time was in Spain and that it was in his own country he painted his picture and carried off the second prize. In the _Mercure de France_ of January 1772 we read: ‘Le 27 Juin dernier l’Académie Royale des Beaux Arts de Parme tint sa séance publique pour la distribution de ses prix. Le sujet de peinture était: “Annibal vainqueur du haut des Alpes jette ses premiers regards sur les campagnes d’Italie.”... Le premier prix de peinture a été accordé au tableau qui avait devise: “Montes fregit aceto,” et qui était de monsieur Paul Borroni etc. Le second prix de peinture a été remporté par M. François Goya romain (_sic_), élève de M. Vajeu, peintre du roi d’Espagne.’

The following paragraph by M. Paul Mantz from the same source is quoted into the _Archives de l’art français_: ‘L’Académie a remarqué avec plaisir dans le second tableau un beau maniement de pinceau, de la chaleur d’expression dans le regard d’Annibal et un caractère de grandeur dans l’attitude de ce général. Si M. Goya se fût moins écarté dans sa composition du sujet du programme, et s’il eût mis plus de vérité dans son coloris, il aurait balancé les suffrages pour le premier prix.’

The Conde de la Viñaza, Goya’s Spanish biographer, maintains that this picture was painted and the prize won before the artist went to Italy, and he proves, by the publication of documents preserved in the Archives of the Pilar Cathedral at Zaragoza, that in October 1771 the painter, forsaking Madrid, was back on the banks of the Ebro in the enjoyment of an enviable reputation. This is in direct contradiction to the old stories describing a love adventure as the reason for his sudden and hasty departure from Rome. A mad enterprise which had for its object the rescue of a young maid from a convent ended, it is said, in his capture, and he ‘only escaped the gallows by the most reckless and headlong flight.’ This much we know, that Goya was in Zaragoza in 1771. He returned not as a fugitive and an outlaw, but as a reputable citizen having the confidence of the Cathedral authorities, who commissioned him to paint the quadrangular vault in the Holy Chapel. The fresco which he prepared as a proof that ‘he was experienced in this kind of painting,’ was submitted to the Building Committee of the Cathedral, on November 11, 1771, together with the director’s assurance that it had received the approval of experts, and with Goya’s offer to paint the vault of the small choir for 15,000 reals, he providing the labourers and materials. The Committee, having heard this proposition and recognising it as better than that made by Don Antonio Velazquez, who asked 25,000 reals for the work, ‘agreed to Goya’s proposition, but in order to be safe and sure,’ it was stipulated that he should make some further studies and submit them to Madrid for the approval of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (San Fernando), ‘which obtained, the negotiations would be completed and the contract signed.’

On January 27, 1772, Goya presented his study to the Committee, who having ‘already been informed that it was a skilful piece of work in specially good style,’ approved it, and waiving the stipulation that it should be submitted to the Royal Academy, they decided that the artist should forthwith proceed with the work. The documents give no information concerning the progress of the work, but we learn from a minute in the Building Committee’s meeting, held on June 1, 1772, that the painting of the choir was nearly finished by that date, and the scaffolding was about to be taken down.

We are without any authentic particulars concerning the next three years of Goya’s life, but the Conde de la Viñaza supposes that with the 15,000 reals which this work brought him, he went to Italy. How he passed his time there cannot be definitely stated, but many interesting surmises have obtained currency. We are assured by Mr. Muther that for Goya ‘the antique had no more existence than the magnificent art of the _cinque-cento_: what attracted him was rather the teeming life of the people. Out of the red robes of the priests, the costumes, gay with colour, of the women of Trastevere, the merry, careless freedom of the Lazzaroni, he created fragments of life, rich with all its varied colour. Muleteers with their jangling cars, religious processions and Carnivale masques,’ to say nothing of much ‘love-making, scuffling and stabbing’--these are imagined to be the influences that directed his genius during his stay in Italy. Paul Lafond (_Goya_), while admitting the legendary element in most of the reported incidents in the life of the painter, repeats the stories of his ascending to the lantern in the dome of St. Peter’s, of his making a tour of Cecilia Melella’s tomb, walking upright on the narrow ledge of the cornice, of his amatory escapade at a convent and its resultant flight from Rome. He also adds that his _genre_ pictures attracted so much attention in Rome that the Russian ambassador, instructed by his sovereign to invite a number of distinguished artists to establish themselves at the Court at St. Petersburg, made Goya a very tempting offer, which he refused. On the other hand, the Conde de la Viñaza declares that ‘he was frequently seen studying the most sublime frescoes in the land, leaning boldly on the decorations of the architraves or on the most dangerous parts of the cornices’; that he secured the necessaries of life by the sale of pictures of the customs of his native land; that he made the acquaintance of Luis David, for whom he formed a deep and lasting attachment; and, finally, that ‘the only recollection he preserved of Italy in his old age was of his having met there the painter of “The Rape of the Sabines.”’

The friendship that existed between Goya and David has called attention to the similarities in the temperament and the aims of the two men, whose work was so widely different. Both used their brushes to glorify the throne and received honours from kings; both sacrificed tradition on the altar of new ideas; and both lacked the tenderness and the faith necessary in the treatment of religious subjects. David was the friend of Robespierre and Saint Just, of Marat and Buonaparte; he painted the ‘Coronation of the Hero of the Pyramids’; he attended the Convention and voted for the death of Louis XVI. Goya was the friend of Godoy and of the ministers of Joseph Buonaparte; he painted the pictures of the Usurper as well as those of the kings that preceded and followed him; and he executed ‘The Disasters of War’ and ‘The Caprices.’ David was ambitious for the aggrandisement of his art, and Goya strove to make it worthy of its civilising mission, but they differed in the means by which they sought to attain their respective ends. David was inspired by the antique, and produced works which possessed the hardness of statuary as well as its clear-cut accuracy of form, while Goya went direct to nature for his inspiration, and his paintings are the reflections of naked reality. The painter of ‘The Death of Socrates’ was imbued with the guiding purpose of making his work dignified, elaborately accurate, and exclusive, while the author of the frescoes of La Florida, drawing inspiration from the customs of the toilers and the dandies alike, held that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ David represented man endowed with improbable and unattractive virtues, Goya painted man as he was; David idealised the individual form with classic grandeur, and his austere and solemn compositions, though based on observation of nature, were moulded to a fixed external idea; but Goya was as faithful to psychologic truth as to anatomy, and his brush revealed the moral sentiments of mankind and laid bare the passionate and terrible emotions of the human soul.