The theme of war is as old as art itself. Ancient works present war as honorable, even glorious, and when artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries turned to the subject, they followed this tradition. Of course, most of them had never seen a battlefield.
Not Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. Goya lived in occupied Madrid, toured battlefields, and witnessed the aftermath of executions and reprisals. He responded by creating art that, for the first time, portrayed war as ugly, muddy, bloody, and unfair. Goya painted war’s bitter truth. It was a strange fate for an artist who began as an adequate Rococo painter seeking success at the Spanish royal court.
There weren’t many opportunities to get ahead in Spain in the mid-1700s, but art offered one way to advance socially—if you were good enough. Goya decided he had what it took. After training in his hometown of Zaragoza, he moved to Madrid in 1774 and worked his way up to court artist. For nearly twenty years, he painted conventionally pretty rococo portraits and country scenes.… Then he got sick.
We don’t know what nearly killed Goya in the winter of 1792–93. He heard ringing in his ears, endured debilitating vertigo, and suffered from fainting fits and semi-blindness. His sickness has been attributed to various causes—Ménière’s disease, botulism, polio, hepatitis—but we really don’t know the cause. He was left completely deaf, and his life would never be the same.
Nor would his art. Goya soon began a series of engravings known as Los Caprichos. The most famous shows a man slumped asleep at a desk as menacing bats and owls swarm in and out of darkness; the caption reads, “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” (The sleep of reason brings forth monsters).
The Caprichos are a motley bunch, part fantasy, part satire, and the public found them baffling and potentially dangerous, what with the Inquisition ready to jump on any perceived blasphemy. Goya had three hundred sets of Los Caprichos printed, but only twenty-seven sold.
The king named Goya First Royal Painter in 1799, but the monarchy’s days were numbered. In 1807, Napoleon convinced Carlos to let him move 100,000 troops into Spain on the pretext of invading Portugal. Then Crown Prince Ferdinand, who combined gross stupidity with raging paranoia, attempted a coup against his father. Terrified, Carlos first abdicated but then changed his mind. Napoleon offered to negotiate if all parties would come to France. Carlos, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, agreed, and in April 1808 the Bourbons obligingly packed their bags. With the royal family in his custody, Napoleon announced he was giving the Spanish crown to his brother Joseph.
One member of the royal family, a thirteen-year-old prince, remained in Madrid, so Napoleon ordered him moved to France. On the morning of May 2, passersby noticed French soldiers bundling the prince into a carriage. Suddenly the locals realized what was happening, and violence broke out across the city. The next day, the French began reprisals, rounding up real and imagined rebels and staging mass executions. From there, it was a steady slide into war.
Spain might possibly have benefited from Napoleon’s rule, particularly his liberal constitution, but the Spanish wanted nothing of it or of Napoleon’s brother Joseph, whom they nicknamed Pepe Bottelas (“Joe Bottles”) for his love of wine. The Spanish army was ill-prepared to fight the superior French, but no matter—the real threat was small, self-organized bands that relentlessly harassed the invaders and then escaped into the hills. These guerrilloros fought throughout Spain in the guerrilla, or “little war,” tormenting the French and lending their name to a new type of conflict. War raged for six long years.
Goya’s loyalties were torn: He supported the new constitution and had little sympathy for the loutish Fernando, but his patriotism ran deep. He certainly wasn’t among those who flocked to the court of King José, but it would have been dangerous to publicly demonstrate resistance. So he painted portraits of members of the French circle and accepted a royal decoration invented by Joseph, the Order of Spain, known derisively for its color as “The Eggplant.”
He also completed several patriotic works such as The Water Carrier and The Knife Grinder, which show his compatriot’s indomitable spirit, while working on a series of engravings that were much less gung-ho. Known as the Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War), the engravings expose the horrors of battle: A peasant hefts an axe over a screaming French soldier; refugees trudge along a road; mangled bodies hang from tree limbs. There is nothing patriotic about these images—the Spanish are shown to be as brutal as the French. Goya seems to have decided the series was too dark and too dangerous to exhibit, so he hid it away. The Desastres de la Guerra weren’t published until 1863, thirty-five years after Goya’s death.
Eventually the French were defeated, and in 1814 Fernando returned in triumph to Madrid. (Carlos had died during the war.) He promptly rejected the liberal constitution, enforced his absolute rule, and mercilessly punished French collaborators. Goya needed to secure his position: Fernando would surely be wary since Goya had accepted that “eggplant” honor. So he sought a commission to commemorate the events of May 2–3.
These works became Goya’s celebration of the Spanish spirit. The first, The Second of May, 1808, is the lesser known of the two; it depicts one of the spontaneous conflicts that broke out on that day in Madrid. The more famous painting, The Third of May, 1808, is Goya’s masterpiece, completed in 1814–15. To the right, a line of French soldiers stand aiming their rifles at a cluster of Spanish partisans. The Spaniards, grouped on the left, hide their eyes, clench their hands, or stare at their executioners in despair; in the center, one throws open his arms and faces the French with wide-eyed defiance. Nothing like this scene had ever been painted. Yes, you can see influences—the arms-out position of the central Spaniard evokes the crucified Christ, for example—but never before had art been so honest about war.
Were the paintings hung in a prominent place to serve as a constant reminder of the cost of conflict? Nope. Fernando was unimpressed, and the paintings drop out of the records. They weren’t even displayed until 1872.
At least Goya was safe and could return to work as a court artist. From 1819 to 1823, he worked on the series known today as the Black Paintings, applied directly onto the walls of his country house. These are huge, strange, haunting images. In the best known, Saturn Devouring His Son, the naked god, his eyes wide in madness, bites down on his offspring’s bloody limbs. Some critics have suggested that Goya himself was a little mad in these years, but evidence in his letters contradicts this notion.
Fernando’s disastrous policies nearly ruined Spain, and finally Goya had had enough. Using the excuse that he needed to visit a French hot spring for his health, he applied for a passport and arrived in Bordeaux in 1824. He spoke no French, but it didn’t matter—he was deaf, after all. He was cared for by his housekeeper/lover Leocadia and her daughter Rosario, who may have been their daughter (facts are inconclusive). Goya died two weeks after suffering a stroke in April 1828, at the age of eighty-two. Although he left no immediate followers, he influenced later artists, notably those of the twentieth century—Modernists who appreciated his willingness to confront the horrors of the modern world and Social Realists who believed art should expose injustice.
Even today we don’t know quite what to do with Goya: How do you reconcile the court painter with the satirist of Los Caprichos? the realist of The Third of May? the fantasist of Saturn Devouring His Son? He doesn’t fit into any artistic categories or schools, nor does his art fit well in museums, where its brutal realism hangs uneasily between the still lifes and landscapes.
Goya met Maria Theresa de Silva y Silva, Duchess of Alba, when he was forty and she was twenty-four. She was in her prime: beautiful, willful, charming, spoiled, and intelligent. Goya fell under her spell, as did, it seems, everyone who met her.
So how well did the duchess and the artist know each other? Impossible to say. Goya certainly knew who she was, showing her in formal portraits, country scenes, engravings, sketches, and perhaps even in the nude. She has been cited as the model for The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja, two paintings that are essentially of the same woman with a faint, intimate smile, lying on a bed and gazing at the viewer. Despite her exposed state in the nude version, the clothed Maja is arguably the sexier of the two. Her white dress reveals as much as it conceals, curving over her hips, falling between her legs, and barely containing her chest.
So are these paintings of the duchess? Neither resembles her. Some biographers assert that Maria Theresa posed for the paintings but Goya changed her face to avoid compromising her reputation. Others say a duchess would never have posed nude for a working-class artist, and, furthermore, the whole “affair” is wishful thinking. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s tantalizing to imagine the enigmatic Goya having a rousing love affair with this apparently irresistible woman.
WOMAN OF MYSTERY #2
We know next to nothing about Goya’s wife, Josefa Bayeu y Subías. Her brothers were artists who presumably introduced her to Goya, and the two married in 1771. It is said she endured twenty pregnancies and suffered repeated miscarriages, but only one child, a son, survived into adulthood. Goya rarely mentioned her in his letters, and we know of none she wrote herself (it’s possible she was illiterate). Last known fact: She died during Spain’s war with France.
Two years into the war with Spain, Goya was asked to paint a portrait of Joseph, the French king. He needed the money, so he reluctantly accepted the commission. He called the work The Allegory of Madrid and composed it so that he wouldn’t have to actually see the king. He copied Joseph’s profile from an engraving and positioned it within a medallion surrounded by frou-frou angels and a beatific maiden symbolizing Madrid.
In 1812, English forces routed Napoleon’s army and Joseph Bonaparte fled Madrid, so Goya painted over the erstwhile king’s profile and replaced it with the word Constitución, in honor of the document that promised basic freedoms to Spaniards. Ah, but then Joseph came back, and Goya returned him to his oval. José I finally left for good in 1813, and Goya had one of his assistants put Constitución back in.
But wait, there’s more. In 1814, Fernando returned to the city and immediately annulled the constitution. Taking its place in the oval was his profile, painted by Fernando’s favorite court artist. There it stayed until 1843, when the city of Madrid, with no fond memories of the dear-departed monarch, had him painted out and the words Libro de la Constitución put in his place. Even that was too partisan to last, and in 1872 new words filled the oval—Dos de Mayo (the Second of May). And so the painting remains to this day.
IN THE WINTER OF 1792–93, GOYA SUFFERED DEBILITATING VERTIGO, FAINTING FITS, AND SEMI-BLINDNESS— TRUE-LIFE MONSTERS THAT APPEARED IN HIS ART, ESPECIALLY THE GROUP OF ETCHINGS KNOWN AS LOS CAPRICHOS.
She is the second-most popular lady in the Louvre—only the Mona Lisa attracts more attention. This ancient statue depicts a beautiful woman, nude from the waist up and with clinging draperies covering her hips and legs. Her arms are broken off near the shoulders.
The so-called Venus de Milo is believed to represent Aphrodite, who was called Venus by the ancient Romans. The statue was discovered in 1820, at the height of the Neoclassical movement. Antiquities were all the rage, and Europeans visiting Greece had a habit of prying loose ancient marbles and hauling them home as souvenirs. So when French sailor Olivier Voutier had shore leave on the Aegean island of Melos, he decided to go treasure hunting near the ruins of the ancient theater. He and a local farmer dug up the statue of Venus along with several other carved stones.
Voutier tried to convince his captain to sail immediately to Constantinople to get permission from the French ambassador to buy the statue, but when the captain refused, Voutier lost interest. However, another French naval officer on the scene, Jules Dumont d’Urville, headed for Constantinople in Voutier’s stead. Permission granted, d’Urville returned to Melos to find the statue in a rowboat in the middle of the harbor; a Turkish official had seized it and made a deal with a Russian captain to ship it to Constantinople. After lengthy negotiations with the islanders, d’Urville arranged to buy the statue, retrieving it from the Russians. Later, Turkish authorities, who were outraged to have such a prize slip through their fingers, ordered the island’s leading citizens to be publicly whipped.
Meanwhile, the statue arrived in Paris safe and sound. At the time, the emerging discipline of art history was dominated by the ideas of German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), whose evolutionary theory declared that Greek art had reached its height during the Classical period (510–323 BCE) and declined during the Hellenistic period (323–146 BCE). When museum experts saw the beauty of the Venus de Milo, they immediately declared it to be the work of a Classical master. Imagine their shock when they learned that among the recovered bits of marble was a carved base that fit the statue perfectly. Its inscription read: “[Alex]andros son of Menides, citizen of Antioch on the Maeander made this statue.” Well, problem was that Alexandros was hardly a master and Antioch on the Maeander didn’t exist during the Classical period—it was a Hellenistic colony. Since the inscription contradicted Winckelmann’s beloved theory, curators decided that the base didn’t really fit the statue. When Venus was displayed, the base was nowhere to be found—and hasn’t been seen since, despite nearly two centuries of searching.
The statue has a sort of simple beauty—chipped, battered, broken, yet elegant. It would have presented a very different image in its prime, however, when it stood in a niche in a gymnasium. The Greeks painted their statues with bright colors and decorated them with jewelry. Serene Venus would have been downright gaudy.
The masterpiece known as the Venus de Milo started life as an incidental sculpture by an unknown artist on a small island. Only today, with so much Greek heritage lost, do we treasure it as a sublime image of feminine beauty. ■
