Part 7

Don Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgado, who supplied the text for the volume of aquafortis engravings of these frescoes which D. José Moria Galvan y Candela executed in 1897, tells us that they were wholly in accord with the conditions of the time. But the sentiment of Mr. Rothenstein is nearer to the truth when, in speaking of these frescoes, he says that he can remember nothing which gave him so clear an idea of Goya’s cynicism. ‘Imagine,’ he writes, ‘a coquettish little church with a white and gold interior, more like a boudoir than a shrine, but furnished with altar, and seats, and confessionals. One’s nostrils expect an odour of _frangipane_ rather than incense, and it must be admitted that Goya’s frescoes do not strike a discordant note in this indecorously holy place.’

The subject of the main composition covers the cupola, and contains upwards of a hundred figures considerably over life-size. The picture illustrates the miracle ascribed to St. Anthony of Padua, who restored to life the corpse of a murdered man in order that he might reveal the name of his assassin and rescue an innocent man who was about to be executed as the perpetrator of the crime. The scene is enclosed by a painted railing which surrounds the entire composition. We see the saint standing on an eminence against a luminous background. His life-giving words have just restored the corpse to consciousness. The man leans forward, supported in the arms of a companion, with his hands clasped in an attitude of profound veneration, his expressive face looking fixedly upon the saint with a gaze of surprise and gratitude. The central figures are surrounded by a motley crowd of men, women, and children, some of whom express their astonishment by eloquent gestures, while others appear indifferent to the miracle that is being performed, and one or two frolicsome boys are seen astride the figured railing. On the spandrils, the intrados, the curvilineal triangles of the arches, and behind the high altar, are groups of angels and cherubs. The angels are beautifully clothed and almost wanton in their human loveliness, the babes are entirely without the illusion of divine origin. It has been said that in this composition Goya perfectly interpreted the spirit of the Church de la Florida; certain it is that these angels with ‘the skin of a camellia, eyes of fire, and the beauty of a harlot,’ which move with audacious freedom of attitude, ‘not in pure spheres of blessedness, but in an atmosphere of atoms of gold illuminated by an Asiatic sun, are the strangest and most beautiful creatures that ever adorned a consecrated house.’

‘The frescoes of la Florida,’ comments C. Gasquoine Hartley, ‘are yet another witness of the truthful humour of Goya’s insight, but not one of his countrymen realised the irreverent irony of his work.’ ‘The figures are as full of piquant intention,’ declared Richard Muther, ‘as can be found in the most erotic paintings of Fragonard.... It is an artistic _can-can_; it is Casanova transferred to colour. All that the Church painting of the past had created is despised, forsaken; and this satire upon the Church and all its works was written in the land of Zurbarán, of Murillo.’ The Conde de la Viñaza alludes to Goya as an artist who painted pictures with religious subjects, but not religious pictures. ‘I do not know,’ he says, ‘a more profane master than this Velazquez, Rembrandt, Vicelli and Veronese rolled into one.’ And he instances his monumental painting at la Florida to illustrate his contention: ‘An admirable energy, the most splendid scale of tones. What relief! What a magic of colour! What a beautiful lesson the light of nature receives there! On the other hand, what lack of religious feeling and spirituality in those frescoes!’ And having denounced in the angels the silkiness of their skins, the brilliance of their eyes, and the wantonness of their beauty, he adds, ‘the miracles of the exemplary man of Padua are familiarly treated as a spectacle of wandering rope-dancers might be!’

It has been said that the King was incensed against the artist for introducing renowned ladies of his court in the faces of the winged archangels, and it is generally believed that the most aristocratic persons of the capital are represented in the frescoes, but if Charles IV. resented his choice of models, he had a most amiable way of expressing his displeasure. Goya himself, writing to Zapater, admitted that ‘the King and Queen are mad on your friend Goya,’ but the madness took the form of a royal order, dated October 31, 1799, which reads: ‘H.M. wishing to reward your distinguished merit and to give in person a testimony that may serve as a stimulus to all professors, of how much he appreciates your talent and knowledge of the noble art of painting, has been pleased to appoint you his chief painter of the Chamber, at a yearly salary of 50,000 reals, which you will receive from this date free of rights, and also 500 ducats a year for a carriage: and it is also his pleasure that you occupy the house now inhabited by Don Mariano Maëlla should he die first,’ etc.

Certainly the frescoes in his own day were extolled as the most important work ever done by Goya’s marvellous brush; he closed the eighteenth century with creations that won for him his greatest contemporary fame and raised him to the summit of his art. If nothing could be further removed from religious inspiration, nothing human could reveal more enchanting beauty, more exquisite grace. These frescoes were praised as ‘an inimitable symphony of light and colour.’ It is not in our province either to accept or to refute the claim that ‘they raise the most common things of Goya’s time to the high spheres of Spanish mystic realism.’ Goya’s contemporaries did not realise that the paintings outraged the canons of propriety and probability, and in later times Señor Rada finds that the painter, in this work, rises always to the regions of mystery, where only genius can penetrate, and responds to the peculiar influence of a temple which seems rather to inspire loving human aspirations, than mystic thoughts of infinite abstraction. ‘Apart from the fact that Goya was a believer and respectful to all that pertained to religion,’ urges Señor Rada, ‘in the principal subject of this painting (the “Cupola”) he is as manifestly mystic and delicate as any painter of the spiritual school. In the central group the risen man partakes of both realism and religious unction. The expression could not be better, nor could the attitude of the saint be more dignified. Apart from this in the other groups, he copied what he was wont to observe in popular gatherings, as he saw it, as it was, as it always will be.’

Goya’s Spanish apologists may well be justified in their contention that his originality forced him to disregard the classic rules and mannerism of traditional Spanish religious art. They see no impropriety or extravagance in surrounding the figure of a revered saint with a crowd of roysterers, prostitutes, cut-purses and Manzanares rascals. And, after all, the point is scarcely worth arguing. Again, when it is protested that Goya’s archangels and seraphim were rather beautiful women than angelic spirits--well! what better conception could there be of angels than the perfections of a charming woman? That is Señor Rada’s retort: ‘The naturalist Goya, surrounded by the seductive beauty of his time, could not conceive or even presume that the chosen beings who sing eternal praises in the ethereal regions of celestial glory were any different. More in accord doubtless, with our pious traditions and with Christian spiritual belief are the glories of Juan de Juanes and Murillo; but each artist has his peculiar temperament as well as his special gamut of colour, and to ask Goya to paint angels like those great Christian artists would be the same as asking the painters of a previous epoch to paint pictures of popular scenes like Goya’s.’

The logic of the foregoing is presumably sound, although the conclusion seems to us to support those who contend that Goya’s temperament rendered him an unsuitable person to translate religious episodes into colour. We remember, as Señors Rada and Pedro de Madrazo assert, that Goya was ‘a believer’ and ‘respectful in everything pertaining to religion,’ and we recall also that in their joint will the painter and his wife describe themselves as ‘firmly believing and confessing the mystery of the Holy Trinity ... and all other mysteries and sacraments, believed and confessed by our Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Mother Church, in whose true faith and belief we have lived.’ But we cannot, at the same time, forget that Goya’s detestation of the priesthood was violent and unresting. If he caught the spirit of ecstasy in his picture of San José de Calasanz receiving the Host at the hands of a priest, he also painted a representation of Santas Justa and Rufina. This picture has been described as the most profane and inappropriate work of the Aragonese genius. It is stated that he selected as his models a pair of well-known _cocottes_ of Madrid, giving, it is said, the caustic, uncanonical explanation, ‘I will cause the faithful to worship vice!’ Goya may have called himself an orthodox conformer to the national church, but his contempt for his ecclesiastical patrons and those who practised the devotions which he mechanically professed, is avowed.

But apart from their religious significance, or their lack of it, these frescoes of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida reveal Goya at his best as a daring draughtsman and fine colourist. The energy, the spontaneity, the light and the relief, the magic of his paint--all are revealed in this work, which occupied him only three months. And what better proof could one desire of the truth of his own contention: ‘In nature colour exists no more than line--there is only light and shade.’ Goya knew how to produce abundant life with simply white lead, the black of smoke, green and vermillion. Richness of colour does not consist in an infinite variety of tints, but in the harmonious variety of tones and in the skilful selection of the key in which the picture is painted. Here Goya surpassed himself in the effect he produced with a palette that was severe in its simplicity, but the processes employed by the master to obtain his wonderfully vivid and charming tones were so varied that they cannot be exactly determined. Of the result, Paul Lafond writes, it is ‘as true as Velazquez, as energetic and as light as Rembrandt, as delicate as Titian, as spiritual as Tiepolo, with infinite perspectives like those of Tiepolo and Veronese, and as refined as Watteau.’

The painting of the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida won for Goya, as we have seen, the coveted office of first painter to the Court. It was at this same time he began to paint less and to take up the needle as a new force of expression. His first work was the series of designs known as ‘Los Caprichos’ in which the spectator is transported into some ‘unheard of, impossible, but still real world’--a world peopled with dapper _majas_, handsome hidalgos, hideous old men and hags more horrible than the witch of Endor, gluttonous priests, spectres and sorceresses, devils and desperadoes and corpses, all the myriad diabolical and terrifying shapes and phantasies in which Goya set down his vision of humanity. The origin, the inspiration and the object of these etchings are still matters of speculation. It is generally agreed that the painter executed the first drafts for these plates after his return from San Lucar. His deafness aggravated by a serious illness, from which he made a slow and painful recovery, obliged him to give up the fatiguing work with palette and brush, and it may well be that he, whose spirit never rested and whose hand was never idle, fell into a habit of preserving his impressions on paper in order to distract his tormented imagination from brooding over his sufferings. It was at a later date that he transferred these drawings on to the copper plates. It may be reasonable to assume, as some have done, that the part of philosopher which he had developed leisurely during his days at Court, as well as the vein of moralist and castigator of vice, was quickened in him by satiety and physical pain. The Conde de la Viñaza appears to believe that Goya suddenly awakened to his power as a caricaturist, and that, irritated at the moral ugliness of his contemporaries, and at the vile coterie which surrounded the King and Queen, he began to inveigh unflinchingly against lasciviousness, covetousness, rapacity, hypocrisy, and ignorance, against the court parasite and the court harlot, the miser and the monk, the women who sold their daughters and the monsters who bought them, against insolent pomp, ecclesiastical rottenness and venal stupidity. Yet probably the view of Gautier is nearer the truth. He assumes that the now popular painter was ‘merely producing so many capricious sketches, when he was in truth drawing the portrait and writing the history of Spain of former days, under the belief that he was serving the ideas and creed of modern times. His caricatures will soon be looked upon in the light of historical monuments.’

Extraordinary as these pictures are by reason of their fancy, their beauty, their saturnine wit, their ‘Gargantuan spirit,’ as well as by the technical skill and originality they display, they are even more extraordinary by reason of the favour with which they were at first received by the people against whom they were directed. At first the plates were issued separately and were passed from hand to hand among the etcher’s friends. But in 1799, probably the year in which the series was completed, a prospectus was issued, advertising the publication of an edition of seventy-two plates. Goya, for unknown reasons, objected to this edition, and the issue was never made. In the meantime the satire of these tumultuous cartoons was discovered by the objects of his ridicule. Godoy, the old Duchess of Benavente, the Queen’s favourites, were the first to be identified, then effigies of the Queen herself and her illustrious lord were recognised upon the plates. The scandal of these allusions aroused an outburst of indignation, instigated, in great measure, by the caricatured and crucified clergy. The office of the Inquisition was moved to take action, and Goya’s popularity and influence were powerless to avert the inevitable catastrophe. Rescue came from the most unexpected quarter. In 1803 the King caused an edition of 240 copies of 80 plates, which had already been printed, as well as the plates themselves, to be acquired by the state, with an order that he had commanded their publication.

It is difficult to account for this splendid action from such a King as Charles IV. Was he so impressed by the merits of these etchings that he was prompted to rescue them from the Inquisition in the interests of art--a magnanimity of spirit ‘of which his character gives no promise’? Probably he was merely insensible to the satire of the pictures. The ‘Caprichos’ were dedicated to the monarch by the artist--a subtle jest on the stupidity of the King, who, Muther concludes, ‘was not even in a position to grasp the meaning of the plates.’ We learn that Charles remunerated Goya by granting his son a pension of 12,000 reals. A reproduction of the letter from the painter referring to this arrangement is as follows:--

TRANSLATION

YOUR EXCELLENCY,--I am in receipt of H.M. Royal Order which your excellency communicated to me on the 6th inst., accepting the offer of my work, the caprices on eighty copper plates engraved with aquafortis by my hand, which I will hand to the Royal Calcografia with the lot of prints which I had printed by way of precaution amounting to 240 copies of 80 prints each copy, in order not to defraud H.M. in the least and for my own satisfaction as to my mode of procedure.

I am very grateful for the pension of twelve thousand reals which H.M. has been pleased to concede to my son, for which I give my best thanks to H.M. and to your excellency.

Your excellency has not replied to a letter of mine, in which I said that the portraits were finished, and also the copy of your excellency’s by Esteve which only lacked the inscription for which he has asked me several times. I also suggested that if your excellency approved I would get the frames made for the originals and would myself go and put them where your excellency might order, so that you might have the pleasure of finding them in their places.

I only desire your excellency’s orders and that you keep well. May God preserve your excellency’s valuable life for many years.--Madrid, October 9, 1803.--Your excellency’s obedient and grateful servant,

FRANCISCO DE GOYA.

To his Excellency Señor Don Miguel Cayetano Soler.

The technical excellence of the Caprichos makes them comparable with those of Rembrandt, while in their meaning and character they may be likened to the work of Daumier. There are the peculiar qualities of Goya’s etching, which recall the truth and naturalness of Fernando Boll, the movement and life of Lievens and Konninck, and the expression and charm of Von Vliet? These artists, whose best individual qualities are all combined in Goya, were pupils of Rembrandt. ‘Only Hokusai,’ writes Mr. Rothenstein, ‘was capable of such monstrous gaiety, such stinging satire, and he alone could have lent probability to such monstrous phantasy; Hogarth was too sermonising, Rowlandson too rollicking; a certain diabolical side of his nature, which Goya allowed to be seen both in the “Caprichos” and “The Disasters,” has probably prevented his etchings gaining a footing in England.’ Certain it is that Goya’s prints are rarely to be met with in this country--a fact that caused the writer of this book to spare no effort in order to include in the illustrations, reproductions of every etching and lithograph, as well as of every portrait or picture of Goya’s, of which he could secure an impression.

It is one thing to admire, even to understand, the technique of the ‘Caprichos,’ but to understand the precise significance of many of the plates is almost impossible. Perhaps the titles printed by Goya beneath the plates are the best guide to their meaning. The only reward to be derived from reading ingenious meanings into the prints is the personal interest one finds in the exercise. The series may be divided into three classes; the first are humorous satires of the foolishness and rottenness of the life of the period; the second are scathing assaults upon the ignorance and greed of the priesthood and the corruptness of the civic institutions; and the last are visions of witches and demons, which may be classed as pure phantasies. There is a depth of meaning in every plate, for Goya reproduces for us in them not only what he has seen, but what he has felt. The first plate illustrates a marriage of convenience, and we are shown the girl-bride being presented to her hideous suitor by her more hideous mother. Over and over again we are presented with this type of the ‘complaisant mother,’ which has been described by Théophile Gautier in illuminating prose. ‘It is impossible’ he writes, ‘to fancy anything more grotesquely horrible, more viciously deformed. Each of these frightful old shrews unites in her own person the ugliness of the seven capital sins; compared to them the Prince of Darkness himself is pretty. Just fancy whole ditches and counterscarps of wrinkles; eyes like live coals that have been extinguished in blood; noses like the neck of an alembic covered with warts and other excrescences; nostrils like those of an hippopotamus rendered formidable by stiff bristles; whiskers like a tiger’s; a mouth like the slit in the top of a money-box, contracted by a horrible and convulsive grin; a something between the spider and the multiped which makes you feel the same kind of disgust as if you had placed your foot upon the belly of a toad.’ The description is horrible even as Goya’s engravings are horrible, and as excellently true as the work by which it was inspired.

It is not possible in the space at our command to review these ‘Caprichos’ in detail, and fortunately it is not necessary. The reader can examine the plates for himself and study their details. He will remark the skill with which the engraver endows ‘The Garroted Man’ with its sombre, gruesome tone; the sense of the unavailing, despairing effort with which the living skeleton in ‘And yet they do not go’ (Plate 369) supports the slab of stone which must inevitably fall and crush the crouching, scarcely human wretches who anticipate their fate with expressions of such lurid horror. One can feel the violence of the wind that buffets the women in ‘A Bad Night’; we enter into the terror of the woman who is employed in her hideous task in ‘Tooth Hunting.’ Here indeed, ‘horror confronts us; corruptness is imagined with an unapproachable depth of grotesqueness.’ In all the realm of art there is nothing to compare with the horror and grotesquerie of these Caprices.

Goya’s next work was the thirty-three plates of ‘The Tauromachia.’ This series of engravings was so brilliant in execution and appealed so strongly in their theme and treatment to the Spanish national affection for the bull-ring, that doubtless they would have brought the etcher even greater contemporary fame than the larger series, but for some unexplained reason, they were not publicly issued until after his death and the death of his only surviving legitimate son. In the ‘Tauromachia’ Goya made less use of aquatint and aquafortis, and, as in his later etchings, relied more and more upon the needle to produce his effects. These scenes of the bull-ring represent the different phases of the combat and the surpassing feats of its most famous exponents. The ‘Caprices’ may appeal more strongly in some respects, but the drawing in the plates of the ‘Tauromachia’ is extremely light and facile, and the illusion of vigorous movement is seen in them all.