The People’s Goya 

Nicholas Penny

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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