Vol. 26 No. 18 · 23 September 2004
pages 17-18 | 2994 words
The People’s Goya
Nicholas Penny
- Goya by Robert Hughes
Harvill, 429 pp, £25.00, October 2003, ISBN 1 84343 054 1
Robert Hughes has a great enthusiasm for Goya’s art, which he communicates in this biography, together with much useful information, forcefully expressed, about the rival factions at the Bourbon court, the Napoleonic invasion, the evolution of bull-fighting, what a maja was, what guerrillas were. This is mixed with some less useful observations – there were in those days priests who ‘groped boys’ and were ‘quite as bad’ as their modern counterparts – and some errors, as when Hughes claims that the curls of pubic hair in the Naked Maja are certainly the earliest in Western art. He concedes that little is known about Goya, yet takes us out shooting with him. Goya ‘liked the macho life . . . You didn’t need to be the duke of this or that to hit a partridge, or to blaspheme victoriously when a puff of dust flew from its ass and it came pinwheeling down, feathers awry, out of the hard hot blue air.’ The vivid image was perhaps suggested by the Caprichos etchings, in which falling winged creatures and even anal puffs feature, but it also removes Goya from the deferential and hierarchical society in which he lived.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 22 · 18 November 2004
From Julian Rathbone
Nicholas Penny's review of Robert Hughes's Goya is properly cautionary but in the end, I think, too cautious (LRB, 23 September). Almost the whole of the first half of Goya's life was spent under the rule of Europe's most enlightened monarch, Carlos III. He initiated a programme of reform that shook up the moribund universities, limited the powers of the Church, increased the powers of central government, created a road system that was the envy of Europe, built canals, issued edicts protecting people at their place of work and provided many other welfare safety nets. It was opposed by the Church, the Inquisition, the feudal landowners and the urban mob, but supported by a rising, if insecure middle class of bankers, merchants and industrialists, and serviced by doctors and lawyers from the reformed universities. Above all it looked to France for inspiration and its supporters were known as afrancesados. Goya and his friends were all part of this movement.
Carlos III was succeeded by the hopelessly weak Carlos IV, who could do nothing to prevent a vicious and sustained backlash following the French Revolution. His father's reforms were swept away, and worse was to follow. In the name of the Revolution, but basically in order to keep Iberian ports open and protect the vulnerable areas of his empire, Napoleon seized Spain and placed his brother Joseph on the throne. The French, hitherto the standard-bearers of Enlightenment, were revealed as ruthless barbarians. Civil war followed, and after that famine.
I wouldn't argue that one can explain all the contradictions and possibly psychotic elements in Goya's work by placing it in this historical context, but to do so begins to account for the irony that underlies, for instance, an image of a line of priests garrotted by the French. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos is usually translated as 'The dream of reason …' but the first meaning of sueño is 'sleep'. 'When reason sleeps, monsters are produced' is the theme of Los Caprichos and much of Goya's later work.
Julian Rathbone
Thorney Hill, Dorset
