GOYA Y LUCIENTES, FRANCISCO JOSÉ. - Spanish painter, b. at Fuendetodos near Saragossa on 30 March 1746 and d. at Bordeaux on 16 Apr. 1828.
He was a pupil at Saragossa of José Luzán y Martínez, who had also studied in Italy, especially at Naples, where he had been a fellow pupil of Solimena. He remained at Saragossa from 1760 to 1765, when he went to Madrid, that is, to a milieu that had seen Mengs and G. B. Tiepolo at work for some years.
But in Madrid the hot-blooded Spaniard, rather than painting, thought of living his life intensely, going so far as to descend into the arena as a bullfighter, until in 1769, perhaps on the advice of Mengs himself, he went to Rome, from which, however, he had to be repatriated because of the adventurous life he led there. On his return to Saragossa in '72 he received important commissions, and it may be said that only from this moment did his actual artistic career begin. On the vault of the small choir of the cathedral of Nuestra Señora del Pilar he painted the Glory of Heaven (1772), a cold Tiepolesque imitation, just as the paintings for the monastery of Aula Dei are also linked to Tiepolo. More personal (and therefore considered by some critics to have been executed earlier) are the wall paintings now in the Museum of Saragossa, coming from the Palace of Sabradial. Around '75 he married the sister of the painter F. Bayeu, with whom he collaborated in Madrid in preparing the cartoons for the tapestries of the royal manufactory of S. Barbara. And it is to these cartoons (which G. painted at intervals until 1791) that the painter owed a great part of his popularity, which also procured him commissions for portraits. In 1780 he was named a member of the "Academy of Painting of S. Fernando," presenting as his admission piece the Crucifix now in the Prado, which, even in its academic arrangement, nevertheless reveals in its vigorous brushstrokes the mark of his rebellious spirit. And it is that same spirit that leads him, also in the cartoons for tapestries - true interpretations of the Spanish life of the time - to free himself from the imitation of French tapestries (to which he succumbed in his first attempts) in order to arrive at a more personal interpretation, with strong contrasts of light (Maja and the Man in the Cloak, The Drinker, The Umbrella, etc.). Kindred to the popular characterizations of the cartoons are also the religious figures painted in one of the domes of the church of El Pilar in Saragossa (1781-82); of 1781-84 is the great composition with St. Bernardine of Siena preaching to Alfonso of Aragon for the church of S. Francisco el Grande. Somewhat later (ca. 1785) are the Annunciation (Duchess of Osuna, Madrid) and St. Gregory and St. Isidore (Romantic Museum of Madrid). Among the most famous portraits of these years are to be remembered that of the architect Ventura Rodriguez (1781), of Cornelio van der Gotten (1872, Prado), of the family of the Infante Don Luis (1783), that of his protectors; the Duke and Duchess of Osuna with their four children (Prado), of King Charles IV in hunting costume and of the Queen, today in the Museum of Capodimonte in Naples, and of his brother-in-law Bayeu. In the tapestry cartoons of these years, moreover, he abandons the crude contrasts of light, immersing the compositions in a warm golden light. In 1785 he becomes president of the Academy; in 1788 he is named court painter by Charles IV, and a year later he paints for the chapel of the cathedral of Valencia the Death of St. Francis Borgia and St. Francis Comforting a Dying Man. In 1792 a serious illness renders him deaf, and the optimism that had sustained him until then fails. The painter shuts himself up in isolation, but his prodigious activity does not diminish, and besides the portraits there are to be remembered the wall paintings in S. Antonio della Floridia (near
Madrid, 1798), the Rembrandtesque Betrayal of Judas in the cathedral of Toledo, and the publication (1797) of the Caprichos, the famous engravings that reveal him as an attentive and caustic observer, a ruthless critic of false traditions, of superstitions, of fanaticism. To the early years of the 1800s may be attributed the portrait of the family of Charles IV (Prado), the two Majas, the portrait of his new powerful protector, the prime minister Godoy, and perhaps to this moment are also to be remembered the six paintings of the Art Institute of Chicago representing the Capture of the Bandit Margato by the Friar Pedro de Zaldivia. In 1808, after the abdication of Charles IV in favor of Ferdinand VII, the painter enters the service of the new sovereign and paints his equestrian portrait. Then the Napoleonic invasion convulses Spain; G. is at first among the sympathizers of the revolutionary movement, but immediately his enthusiasm weakens and he becomes, on the contrary, one of the most tenacious opponents of the foreign master, and from his embittered soul spring the engravings of the Désastres de la guerre (published posthumously in 1863), a ruthless indictment of the French domination. After the French left in 1814, with the aim of celebrating the Spanish resistance he executes the equestrian portrait of General Palafox (Prado) and the famous 2 May and 3 May. In 1815 he publishes the series of engravings of the Tauromaquia; then that of the Proverbs, Disparates, many of which are of obscure meaning. Of 1819 are two of his most remarkable religious paintings, the Communion of St. Joseph Calasanz and the Agony in the Garden (Escuelas Pias, Madrid). Following the establishment of the absolutism of Ferdinand VII (1823), the artist prefers to abandon Spain, and in 1824, at 78 years of age, he moves to France, settling in Bordeaux, where he continues to draw and paint. To this last period belong The Milkmaid of Bordeaux (Count of Muguiro, Madrid), St. Peter (Phillips Memorial Gallery of Washington, 1827) and St. Paul (Lilienfeld Galleries of New York, 1827).
The art of G. is truly, and not only for Spain, the announcement of a new epoch. The Spanish painter breaks away from the conformism of official and courtly art in order to realize fantastic visions, but nevertheless profoundly human and therefore, in a certain sense, religious. For G. expresses his religious feeling - as L. Venturi has noted - "not when he has to represent a religious scene, but when he finds the motive of his own religion, the religion of independence, of liberty, of humanity." Not a skeptical Voltairean, therefore, as he has been defined by some, but a man sustained by a profound moral sense that leads him to rebel against every corruption, hypocrisy and abuse. His art, then, also presents itself in a new form, with an impressionistic technique of contrasts of colors.
From the very beginning, the cartoons for tapestries offered him the possibility of using a more spontaneous technique, because it was less finished and therefore less academic, and on his vision a preponderant influence was certainly exercised by the discovery of the art of Velázquez — some of whose paintings G. engraved in 1777-78 — and, later, by the influence of Tiepolo, which at a certain point was replaced by that of Rembrandt. And this latter is certainly the happiest period: it is the moment of the "Caprichos," the expression of feelings that come violently from the depths and that want to be realized violently. A dynamism of form that is also what determines, for example, the commemorative painting of the Executions of May 3, one of the greatest masterpieces of G.'s art. As for religious works properly speaking, on the other hand, the artist succeeds in creating deeply felt works of art only toward the end of his life, as in the Communion of St. Joseph Calasanz or in the Agony in the Garden (1819). In the works executed in France in his last years, his technique evolves still further toward a more powerful synthetism, based on the abolition of contours and the darkening of colors: a vision by masses that is the ultimate achievement of his agitated artistic imagination. - See pl. LXXIII.
Bibliography10 works
Gilberto Ronci