Crisis and a New Start
1792-1798
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TIMELINE
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Francisco de Goya
Self-Portrait
1795-1797
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1792 In Britain, Mary Wollstonecraft demands equal rights for
women.
1793 The last woman in Europe to be executed for witchcraft is
burned.
1792 Goya travels to Andalusia; he falls seriously ill and loses his
hearing.
1793 Paints small cabinet pictures.
1793-94 In France, the Terror rages under the Jacobin Robespierre.
1795 Godoy brokers a treaty between France and Spain. Emmanuel
Kant: On Perpetual Peace
1795 Death of Goya's brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu. Appointed
Director of Painting at the Madrid Academy. First portrait of the
Duchess of Alba.
1796 Stays at the country seat of the Duchess of Alba in Andalusia.
1797 Back in Madrid in April. Starts workon the Caprichos. Withdraws
from his teaching obligations at the Academy because of his
deafness.
1797 Lithography is invented.
1798 Construction of the first high-pressure steam engine.
1798 Paints frescoes in the church of San Antonio de la Florida, and
an altar painting for Toledo Cathedral.
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The year 1793 marked a significant change in Goya's career. A
severe illness provoked a physical and mental crisis that changed
him permanently. The illness left him stone-deaf. The proud society
painter, confident and daring, became a man who looked at reality
with a far more critical eye. Deafness made him mistrustful of
people, but also sharpened his visual perception. He could no longer
ignore life's darker side - and no longer wanted to. As a result he
began taking the internal world of his imagination increasingly
seriously. A passionate affair with the capricious Duchess of Alba
brought confusion to his private life; the happiness and despair of
this short, violent love affair are reflected in several drawings
and paintings. Goya, who was now approaching 50, was less prepared
to tailor his art to what was expected of him.
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Sojourn in Andalusia
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The nature of his illness is appalling
and I look to his recovery
with great
sadness.
Francisco Bayeu to Martin Zapater
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Francisco de Goya
Portrait of Martin Zapater
1797
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Francisco de Goya
Self-Portrait
1795-1797
Ink and wash 23.5 x 14.4 cm
New York, Metropolitan Museum
of Art
Goya stares intently at his reflection in the mirror, as though he
were trying to plumb the depths of his being. After his physical and
psychological crisis, the deaf Goya viewed himself and his
contemporaries with a deep mistrust. |
In November 1792 Coya, seriously ill, arrived at the home in Cadiz
of the wealthy businessman Sebastian Martinez. He was suffering from
attacks of dizziness, loss of balance, and deafness. In bed for a
full two months, he was afraid he was going mad. When the crisis was
over he was permanently deaf. Goya's illness has never been
explained; suppositions extend from syphilis to schizophrenia. It is
probable that lead poisoning had a role to play, as Goya used large
quantities of the highly poisonous pigment white lead, and was
probably not very careful with it. In addition to this, the purpose
of his trip to Andalusia remains a mystery. There are only vague
references to this in the letters between his friend Martin Zapater
and his brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu during his illness. In
October 1792 Goya was still busy at the Academy in Madrid. He must
have left the capital soon afterwards, without applying for official
leave from the court. In the summer of 1793 he was back in Madrid
but had neither the strength nor the inclination to work on the
tapestry designs he had left unfinished. Instead, he painted a
series of small cabinet pictures, without a commission, to distract
himself from dwelling on his illness.
It was now that he began to use personal experiences and ideas as
subjects for his painting. To explain this approach, unusual at the
time, he wrote to the members of the Madrid Academy that he had been
able to "make observations that are generally not allowed in
commissioned works, and in which caprice [capricho] and invention
have free play." In these paintings he represents recollections of
his journey, including bullfights and scenes from street theaters;
other images show huge fires at night, a shipwreck, highway robbery,
and a lunatic asylum. The recurrent theme of these paintings is the
power that the unpredictable forces of nature have over man; several
deal with the borderline between life and death, sanity and madness.
This is where Goya's real work began, work that was to make him one
of the major precursors of modern art.
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Francisco de Goya
Portrait of Sebastian Martinez
1792
Oil on canvas
93x67.5 cm
New York,
Metropolitan
Museum of Art
The painting shows the businessman as a sensitive thinker. It was
completed before Goya's illness, which held him captive for months
in his friend's house, where he was able to study the latter's art
collection.
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Francisco de Goya
Bandits Attack a Coach
1793-1794
Oil on zinc 50x32 cm
Madrid, Marques de Castro Serma
This painting belongs to the series of small works Goya painted
just after his illness. It shows highway robbers attacking a coach in
a lonely mountain landscape.
One of the bandits is standing guard on the roof of the coach while
the others are dispatching the passengers with knives and guns. Goya
may have heard about such events during his journey to Andalusia. A
few years previously he had already used this subject in a painting
for the Duke of Osuna.
The two pictures are similar in terms of composition. But the
earlier painting seems anecdotal, almost like a scene from a play.
This painting, by comparison, is more realistic and conveys the true
brutality of the incident more honestly.
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The Duchess of Alba
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As for Cayetana, meanwhile, she was born of the heights where
freedom reigned, foolishly and splendidly free of those fears that
bind and torment all those who were not born to such dizzy heights.
And he was full of envious admiration because she was as she was, so
foolish and so fearless,.. and he was aware, at a deeper level than
before, that he would never be free of the woman.
Lion Feuchtwanger, Goya
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Francisco de Goya
The Duchess of Alba
1795
Oil on canvas, 194 x 130 cm
Collection of the Duchess of Alba, Madrid
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The duchess and the painter
She was one of the most famous and most fascinating women in Spain.
A capricious beauty and a grandee of unbending pride, she was
descended from one of the oldest aristocratic families in the
country - the Duchess Cayetana de Alba. She became Goya's most
famous model and his passionate love. In 1795,Goya received a
commission to execute full portraits of the Duchess and her husband.
In a delicate white dress with a burning red sash around the narrow
waist, the Duchess of Alba stands in front of a broad landscape. Her
billowing black hair falling to her shoulders, she seems for Goya
the very image of sensual beauty. It is possible that Goya fell in
love with her then. Her gaze, however, is distant, almost without
expression.
Her husband died in June of the following year. The intense
relationship between Cayetana and Goya must have begun shortly
afterwards. Goya had returned to Andalusia in May 1796 to carry out
commissions for the Church,
to visit friends, and to study art treasures in Seville and
Cadiz. The innocent trip took a fateful turn when the duchess invited
him to spend some time at her country seat in Sanlucar, Andalusia,
where she was spending her period of mourning. During his time with
her he filled his sketchbook with drawings that give a direct
insight into the happiness of their passionate relation ship. Or are
these merely the results of his unrequited desire for her? The affair
is disputed to this day. Spontaneous, perfunctory ink drawings show
the duchess going for a walk, or lightly dressed at her morning
toilet; they also show other young women captured in natural,
sometimes intimate, poses. A second portrait of the duchess was
executed in 1797. Again, the Duchess is standing upright, in the open
air, but instead of the maidenly white, she is wearing the black
dress of a maja, with a black lace mantilla framing her
ivory-colored face. It had become fashionable with the Spanish
aristocracy to adopt the popular style of the majas, who in
their typical costume were seen as the essence of the true,
unchanging Spain. The majas were famous -renowned for their pride,
their unaccountability, and their great beauty. The duchess points authoritatively to the words at her feet. There, written in the sand,
are the words "Solo Goya" (Only Goya). This seems like an open
admission of their passion, though the consummation may well have
been more a figment of Goya's passionate imagination than factual
reality.
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Francisco de Goya
Portrait of the Duchess of Alba
1797
Oil on canvas, 210 x 149 cm
Hispanic Society of America, New York
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 Francisco de Goya
La Duquesa de Alba y su ama
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Francisco de Goya
El Marques de Villa-franca y Duque de Alba
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Francisco de Goya
Volaverunt
Capricho N. 61
1798
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The sickness of love
The 33-year-old beauty and an aging, deaf painter... In Goya's
sketchbook the relaxed, high-spirited drawings are succeeded by
sarcastic caricatures and dark visions. The passionate affair became
a tortured nightmare. His honor mortally wounded, Goya's
drawings. and subsequently his prints, took aim at the tragicomic
aspects of life -at human passion, at the coquetry, deceit and
unfaithfulness of women, at the ridiculous behavior of their suitors.
On page after page women are depicted as seductive witches, or
indeed as incomprehensible, demonic beings. One sheet shows smirking
witches carrying off a female figure through the air: her face bears
Cayetana's features. This sheet bears the Latin title
Volaverunt ("they have flown away"), which in Spain at that time
meant "gone and forgotten."
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San Antonio de la Florida
1792-1793
The small church of San Antonio de la Florida contains Goya's most
important religious paintings. The frescoes were executed with
extraordinary artistic confidence, Goya painting the figures quickly
with broad, sweeping brushstrokes.
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The Last Church Fresco
Since Goya was now working for the court and aristocracy, he only
rarely painted religious pictures. In 1798, however, he created his
last great church fresco, for the chapel of San Antonio de la
Florida outside the gates of Madrid, a chapel that belonged to the
king's estate. Since time immemorial there had been, on the La
Florida property, a hermitage dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua. As
Royal Court Painter, Goya was commissioned to decorate the chapel
and vault of a newly built classical church. At the same time, he
was working in his studio on the prints for his Caprichos, which
made sharp satirical criticism of the Catholic Church.
Goya worked on the frescoes for four months, probably supported by
his assistant Asensi Julia.
Today, Mass is read only once a year in this church - on April 16,
the date of Goya's death. Since 1919, San Antonio de la Florida has
been a Spanish national monument, and contains Goya's bones, which
were brought to Spain from Bordeaux almost too years after his
death. A copy of the church was built a short distance away, for the
cult of St. Anthony.
Goya decided on a composition for which there was no precedent in
religious fresco painting. Till then, church domes had always been
the preserve of the divine, with floating crowds of angels and a
representation of God. Goya, however, painted a group of people with
the craggy landscape of Spain behind them. The miraculous apparition
of St. Anthony almost assumes the nature of an incident in everyday
public life.
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Francisco de Goya
The Miracle of St Anthony
1798
Fresco, diameter c. 550 cm
San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid
According to legend, St. Anthony appeared during a court hearing in
his native city of Lisbon in order
to save his father who had been unjustly accused of murder. At the
saint's bidding, the murdered man came back to life and accused the
real murderer. Goya moved the setting from the courthouse into the
open, and depicted a crowd of people pressing against a painted
balustrade. The saint appears in the throng, standing on a rock,
above him the empty vault of heaven with only a slender tree to add
perspective. In this depiction, the event is no saintly apparition: it
seems a
down-to-earth event. The spirited figures behind the balustrade, the
acrobatic boys. the pensive young women, and powerful men are rooted
in the world of Goya's experience and imagination. They are not even
paying full attention to the miraculous event, but are acting as
they would at a public event, trying to see and be seen.
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Francisco de Goya
The Miracle of St Anthony
(detail)
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Francisco de Goya
The Miracle of St Anthony
(detail)
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