Slide please Susana.
So, here, yes, yet another letter from Goya. Notice the nobiliary particle de in the signature — slide please — Francisco de Goya, which he had petitioned the court for a few years before. At great expense. We can only speculate on what social forces were at work here. He didn’t always use the de in his correspondence or when signing his works — in certain contexts, it would have been read as “putting on airs”, and in others, it would have been potentially dangerous, especially during this Revolutionary period, when French nobles were shedding the nobiliary de in their surnames in hopes of hiding among “le peuple” and keeping their heads. And it is interesting that Goya uses it in this letter, because it is addressed, as we see here — slide please Susana — to “mi querido Martín”, his dear Martín, Martín Zapater, who probably knew De Goya better than anyone on earth, with the possible exceptions of his mother, his wife, and his mistress. Is its use here ironic? Perhaps. “Mi querido Martín”, 1747-1803, was a wealthy Aragonese merchant. With no nobiliary “de” in his name. He was also Goya’s best friend.
Slide por favor Susana.
Goya painted this portrait of Zapater a year before. Notice the warmth, the sympathy, especially in the eyes, the lips, the hands. Goya struggled with hands, he charged extra for them, and these for his dearest friend are lovingly rendered. Slide. “Goya. A su amigo, Martín Zapater 1797”. Zapater had been Goya’s closest friend since — slide please — they were boys together in Zaragoza, and according to some — to many in fact, including Susana here — Martín was his on-again, off-again lover. But we’ll not go into that. This is hardly a “Queering of Goya” class, far from it, that’s more the approach of the Susana school, and certain other esteemed colleagues in the department. I have no problem with the approach, but it’s not where my concerns lie. Biography will only get us so far. It’s perhaps important, it’s perhaps revelatory of something, but it often occludes more than it opens. I’m more of an old-school Goya for Goya, art for art, painting by painting, what was happening at the time, what is happening now, what is happening for you, the author is dead but meanings proliferate out of its corpse type of art historian. But that’s perhaps a discussion for another time.
Slide please Susana. Gracias.
This was written on April 1, 1798, but dated, as you can see — up here, top left corner — using the French Revolutionary calendar. “Tres Germinal, año six el día de la bígaro.”
Three Germinal, year six, the day of the periwinkle.
No, periwinkle the flower. Not the sea snail. Can everyone hear me back there? Pervenche in French, not bigorneau, but in Spanish, as in English, the same word, bígaro — periwinkle in English — is used for both the sea snail and the flower. I’ll talk about this later, you’ll see why.
Yes. Germinal, the first month of spring, from the French word germination. New growth. Fertility. Sorry? Exactly, like the Zola novel, yes, good. Nice to know people are still reading the canon. Germinal, the miner. From the Latin, germen, which means seed. Zola’s Germinal is the seed that germinates revolt among the miners, among all the workers of the world, that seeds their — and our — hope for the future.
No, April 1st is not April Fool’s Day in Spain. Their April Fool’s is El Dia de los Santos Inocentes, on December 18. We call it the Massacre of the Innocents. You’ve seen it in paintings, when Herod learns from the wise men that the king of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem and sends his soldiers out to slaughter all the male babies. Goya painted it once, based on the Rubens but much more gruesome. Babies beheaded, smashed against walls, thrown on fires. Horrible. It was lost during the Second World War. During a German aerial bombing, I think. I can dig up a photograph if you like.
December 28. Thank you, Susana. Ah? I didn’t know that.
So. Eyes up here, please.
This is the only letter we know of that Goya dated this way. He was always very careful not to express political views. But especially in this period, by which I mean late 1797, early 1798, which, as we saw last week, was a tumultuous time in Spain. As it was of course everywhere else in Europe. But, perhaps, outside of France, it was especially turbulent in Spain, because politically, socially, intellectually, pretty much in every way you can imagine, this was Spain’s most intensely transformative and difficult period since, well, since the Muslims were finally defeated in Grenada and the Jews kicked out or forced to convert.
Yes, that’s certainly true. Undeniably. Good point, Susana. Bien dicho. No. 1492. Yes. Yes, but that’s not really pertinent to our present discussion, is it? Yes. I see your point, or the point you’re trying to make, but this — of course. No, I don’t agree. Certainly. That would be fine. Can we — right. Of course. Why don’t the three of you, and anyone else interested, see me after class?
Ok. Shall we continue? Vamos. Slide please Susana.
Right.
This is the period in which the Spanish government flipped and flopped between reform and conservatism under Manuel Godoy, who we spoke about last week, slide please, Susana — here looking somewhat puny and ridiculous on his horse — Goya painted this in 1794 or 1795.
Did Goya intend to make Godoy look so clownish? Impossible to say. Just as it is impossible to say what his intentions were when he painted his portraits of the royal families — slide — or this one of Carlos III — slide — or here, Queen Maria Luisa, the wife of Carlos IV — or slide — the entire family. Yes, to our eyes they look like buffoons, an no doubt they probably were. But we know that the families themselves were very pleased with their likenesses. They not only didn’t put him in prison or ban him from the court, they paid him handsomely and promoted him. The King, Carlos IV, named him First Court Painter— Primer Pintor de Cámara de Su Majestad — with a salary of 50,000 reales and a further 500 ducats for a carriage, a very fancy British one, golded with gold, the top of the line. This was an enormous amount of money back then. He was the equivalent of — well, there really are no equivalents.
Koons? Jeff Koons? Good lord no.
She’s the singer? No.
No, no, nothing like that, not quite a rock star, but, well, between his official salary and his commissions, very very comfortable.
Slide please Susana.
So.
Just two days before Goya wrote this letter, Godoy had fallen completely out of favour with his Queen and her husband, Carlos IV, his principal benefactors.
Why? Slide please Susana.
Because the French Republic, which, after being Spain’s main enemy — they had fought a hard, bloody, brutal war between 1793 and 1795 — had become Spain’s main ally, and in many ways its proxy government.
Making sense of all this is enormously complicated. I won’t bore you with too many details because they don’t really matter for our purposes. And no, before you ask, this won’t be on the final because as I said last week there is no final. Just the essays and the group project. But if you’re interested in knowing more, I can suggest some reading materials, or you could talk after class to Susana, as she’s an expert, much more than I am.
Diapositiva por favor Susana. Thank you.
Basically, yes, France, after the Terror, after the death of — slide please — Robespierre, France was torn apart by unrest, most of it incited by vengeful monarchists who were — this next is the first of the images I warned you about, so please avert your eyes if you’re sensitive to violence, next slide por favor Susana before you close yours — rounding up Jacobins and sans-culottes and systematically slaughtering them.
Meanwhile, slide please, you can open your eyes, in Spain, republican, liberal, and enlightenment sentiments were on the rise, and Godoy, after the failed plot by the explorer Malaspina to overthrow him — slide — Malaspina? Talk to Susana about this after class or look it up on Wikipedia — Godoy needed to crush them — “los ilustrados”, the men of the Spanish enlightenment — if he was to survive, and so he had sided with the French, the new post-Terror French, the French of le Directoire, the five-member committee who ran France until it was overthrown by Bonaparte’s coup in 1799.
Yes, of course there were ilustradas. Women from the Queen down played significant roles in the court and elsewhere, particularly in the salons, the “tertulias”. We’ll cover this later. We’ll see this especially with the Duchess of Alba and the Duchess of Osuna.
So Godoy, desperate — slide please — pressured by France, pressured by the Spanish liberals, pressured by the Spanish conservatives, broke Spain free from its long-standing allies, joined France in a disastrous war against Britain and Portugal, and then, when France negotiated a peace with the English and the Portuguese without including or even consulting with Spain, Queen Maria Luisa — slide — Godoy’s best ally, and probably his lover, and the — slide — King, who some say was also his lover — soured on him, and, fearing the loss of their own heads, kicked him out of office.
Of course, don’t forget, these same French had decapitated their king, Louis XVI, Carlos’s cousin, just a few years before.
1794.
Thank you, Susana. 1793.
And then, slide please, less than three years later, they put him back in as Prime Minister.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Slide, please. Back to April 1778. This is the period in which the British attacked Puerto Rico, next slide, took Trinidad, next, and Menorca, next, and destroyed most of the Spanish fleet off the coast of Portugal.
Next. The period in which the Logia de los Caballeros Racionales formed in Cadiz. Next. There was a nasty coup in the Netherlands. Next. Napoleon’s forces took the Pope hostage. Next. And — trigger warning, slide, France, even though its cities and towns — this is Lyon — were in bloody, violent, chaotic civil war, took control of — slide please — Austria, Poland, Italy, Parma, Venice, Rome, the Papal States and Switzerland.
Slide. Coleridge and Wordsworth had just been translated into Spanish. Slide. As was Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Did Goya read any of these? Probably not. They were not in his library in Bordeaux at the time of his death, nor among the books he left with his son in Madrid. Goya wasn’t much of a reader. I mention these writers only to situate him in this historical moment. Others could be added. Walter Scott. Hegel. Goethe. Schiller. Fichte. Schelling. L'Histoire de Juliette by the Marquis de Sade.
And the published music of Haydn and Beethoven. Which Goya, like Beethoven, for the last half of his life, couldn’t hear. I’ll talk more about this later, the similarities between Goya and Beethoven, and their — slide please — Conversation Books, the notebooks that Goya, like Beethoven, kept, often around his neck on a chain, in order to communicate with people after he lost his hearing. And of course — slide — to sketch in.
Slide. Slide. Slide.
This was five years after the illness that left Goya permanently deaf and disabled, barely able to hold a brush. Now, however, in this intense and dangerous moment, he has never been more prolific. Slide. Slide. Slide. Small commissioned paintings like these, images of witchcraft and sorcery. And uncommissioned works like these, next slide, please, Susana, the satirical Caprichos, which he had to pull from sale after just a few days because they were too critical of the Court and the Clergy.
Next slide. Next. Next. Next. Next.
The melancholic portrait of his great political reformer friend, the Minister of Justice Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Slide. The portrait of the handsome French Ambassador Ferdinand Guillemardet. Finally, slide please, the frescos in the church of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, peopled with the likenesses of sex workers.
Slide. Ok, enough potted history. Back to the letter of 3 Germinal, año VI el día de la bígaro.
Below the date, here, is this sketch of that bígaro, a periwinkle sea nail, with — sorry, ithyphallophobic alert — an erection. Then the salutation, “Querido Martín”.
Side note, of interest — to some, perhaps. Next slide, please. Males of the so-called “rough periwinkle” variety, aka Littorina Arcana, of which this fellow here I’m told is an example, will synchronously shed their copulatory organs after the mating season, apparently to conserve energy. They then regrow them when the season resumes. Further, females of this species, when in a marine environment contaminated by the biocide tributyltin, aka, TBT, will masculinise by growing a penis on the top of their heads. This process, which is widely used as a bioindicator for detecting TBT pollution in European coastal waters, and on the east coast of North America, is termed intersex.
Quiet please. Previous slide Susana por favor.
The letter opens with a short description of Goya’s tristeza, his sadness, at the state of his pene triste y deshinchado, his sad, deflated penis, followed by two paragraphs about a fiesta held two days before in the Cafe Retiro in Madrid to celebrate his forty-sixth birthday.
Feel free to correct me here Susana.
“Eels, straight from the Ebro, with oysters as big and juicy as your balls, Martín, and octopus, cava, brandy, excellent Extramadura hams, more brandy, half a lamb and a mountain of pasteles and yet more brandy, poured this time into giant bowls of sweet coffee and ice cream. A superb feast, the most ostentatious ever, and none of it could I enjoy, could only sadly gaze on and barely touch, not just because you were not there, my old friend, but because I still, all these weeks later, have no appetite. The sight of it. And of the revellers gorging themselves on it while raising glass after glass of my wine to my health, made me ill.”
Goya’s eldest son, Francisco Javier, had died of the plague in early March.
Next slide, please.
This is undated, and in different ink, but for reasons too long to enumerate here we are confident it is part of the same letter. Here he describes the catastrophic state of his finances and health. “I am spent. My accounts, mi polla, mis pelotas – my penis, my testicles – you would not recognize them in their puniness, they would frighten you, make you quiver and wretch, temblando y desfallecer, like the last rabbit in hell.”
Next, please. I’m sorry for moving so quickly. We have a lot of ground to cover.
A sketch of Goya at a worktable wearing a long coat, his bald head bare. Floating in the air around him are death's-head moths and giant ravens, and these are periwinkle flowers. Below it is written: “But the work, Martín. Finally. It has never been more potent. I have finished the sixth of the seven cabinet paintings I wrote to you about last month, it and the rest are unlike any I have done, that anyone has done, that anyone has ever dreamed of doing. I will not waste them on Moratín — Moratín, you remember, is the playwright we talked about last week — I will save them for myself, or share them with you, my friend, or sell them to the richest brute in the Americas, in exchange for the deeds to his largest sugar and tobacco plantations and all his wives, daughters and slaves.”
Slide.
Leandro Fernández de Moratín, 10 March 1760 to 21 June 1828. The Younger, the son of the pornographer. The cuadros de gabinete Goya mentions are the seven Las Siete etapas del hombre paintings, in pen and ink and oil on panel, illustrating the seven stages of man enumerated in the “All the world's a stage” monologue from Act II Scene VII of William Shakespeare's As You Like It, for, you see here, ‘for inclusion in Moratín’s book’ – a new Spanish-language edition of Shakespeare’s complete works.
“Son tú, Martín. O yo. O los dos.” They are you, Martín. Or me. Or both of us.
Slide.
A year and some later, on 12 November 1799, three days after the coup d’état in Paris, Goya wrote a second letter to Martín. In it, he calls Napoleon a ‘monster and a miracle, a plague sent from the future to wipe away the past, a hero of the ages.’ He then describes a series of etchings, including seven based on the Moratín Siete that he had “personally delivered to Moratín’s publisher” that morning. “As you know, better than any, I am only a lover of life and ladies, not of books. I could give a toss for words — Me importan un carajo las palabras. In these last weeks however, I had a quick skim of Moratín’s pieces, including the Prince of Denmark Hamlet, but only as far as the old ghost, who, in the darkness, which I have reproduced faithfully, tells the young prince that, while he was sleeping, a villain poured poison in his ear, and now that villain wears his crown, and he — the father, not the villain — like me, is condemned to walk the earth alone, unseen, unheard and unhearing.”
Goya, before and even after illness robbed him of his hearing, attended performances of Shakespeare plays at the Teatro del Príncipe in Madrid, including a Taming of the Shrew with María del Rosario Fernández — slide — La Tirana — as Katherina, and her husband, slide, Francisco Castellanos, — El Tirano — as Petruchio, in 1792. I mentioned them last week. Goya painted separate portraits of the couple the same year.
Go back please Susana, again, La Tirana, now in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, is a masterpiece. So, too, apparently, was El Tirano, but a short-lived one: on the day his wife presented it to him, Castellanos ran it through with a wooden costume sword and threw it in a chimney fire. It was rumoured that he and Goya fought a duel the following morning in the Retiro, but there is no evidence to support this.
Moratín’s illustrated volume of Shakespeare works was never published. Goya’s Siete plates and prints are presumed lost. The Hamlet painting was never mentioned again.
Slide, Susana. Thank you.
The Siete paintings — Niño (“Infant”) — there are six more, Susana — Escolar (¨Schoolboy”), Amante (“Lover”), Soldado (“Soldier”), Justicia (“Justice”), Pantalón (“Pantaloon”) and Vejez (“Old age”) – were destroyed in a fire at the National Library in Buenos Aires in 1921. These seven heliographs of the paintings, made by the French photographer Nicéphore Niépce with dissolved bitumen in lavender oil in 1825, are in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. Among the oldest extant photographs, they are considered too fragile to be handled or digitalized, and thus were not made “consultable” to this researcher, despite repeated requests; all I have are these terrible copies, made in the 1940s.
Therefore, for the cursory introduction to Goya’s life and oeuvre that follows, I shall draw from seven other works, or their details.
The first, slide please, a detail from the bottom left corner of a chronological frieze, depicts Goya as a boy standing next to a greyhound identical to the one Cervantes describes in the first sentence of Don Quijote and then never mentions again. Goya was forty years old when he painted the frieze and he is around thirteen years old in it, erect and proud, musket in one hand, the galgo’s leash in the other. We know these two “edades del hombre” – the older painter and the younger, painted – because of the caption that runs along the bottom of the frame in red, just above the ornate frame that his brother Francisco made.
The caption:
LOS CAZADORCILLOS DE ZARAGOZA (PUERTA DE SANCHO, 1759)
F° DE GOYA, EL PINTOR DEL REY, 1786.
Goya never read Don Quijote but because of his grandfather, with whom he shared a bedroom from the age of four through nine, he knew every aventura it contains. The year before, 1785, he depicted four of these adventures in preliminary cartoons for royal tapestries for the Pardo palace — slide, the fight with the muleteers, slide, the burning of the chivalric books, slide, the attack on the windmill, slide, Sancho tossed in the air in a blanket by the guests at the inn. Carlos III commissioned sixteen Quixote tapestries, but the project was stopped when Goya became Assistant Director of Painting at the Royal Academy of San Fernando. None of the cartoons were made into tapestries. None of the cartoons survive. Only these sketches.
Slide.
Goya’s grandfather was a brujo from Guipúzcoa.
Slide.
Goya’s father, like Goya’s brother Francisco, was a goldsmith. Slide.
His mother was illiterate, of semi-noble birth. This was the family story, at any rate the story the family told, that the mother was hidalga – “hija de algo”, the daughter of something. His grandfather was a peasant, unpossessed of horse or hound. His father read passages to him from the Gospels. He learned the earlier stories from the priests.
“Daughters are of no consequence.” He wrote this in the last Conversation Book, two weeks before his death.
The Conversation Books, as I described last week, were the notebooks Goya kept, like Beethoven, in order to communicate with people after he lost his hearing.
Slide. German bombs destroyed the frieze during an aerial attack in August 1937. Only three photographs of it survive. Slide. In this one, a detail of the far-left panel, “Paco” – almost everyone called Goya “Paco”, throughout his life – is leaning against the stone gate at the northeast edge of Zaragoza’s medieval wall, the Puerta de Sancho, trying to look as self-possessed as the taller boy next to him, Martín Zapater. Above Martín’s image are the words:
Martín Zapater y Claveria
QUERIDO AMIGO. AMOR SIEMPRE.
With Martín at the stone gate are — slide — these two girls dressed in green dresses with pleated white collars. Their long black tresses are wrapped and pinned in crowns of red ribbons, which Goya makes look like haloes of blood. Both are fifteen and named Maria de Pilar. None of this information appears on the frieze. Martín’s foreshortened right arm, one of Goya’s best, is draped over the shoulders of one of the girls; she is covering her mouth with a half-closed fan – to hide her laugh or her teeth, which, as you can see in this detail – slide please – are discoloured. The other Maria is — slide — black and, according to most sources, Goya knew her well. Her father worked in Paco’s uncle’s ice-house and was buried on his mother’s farm. Goya makes her look like the black virgin that his father, the gilder — slide — readorned with gold leaf in the chapel on the Camino del Norte, the Virgin Beltza in the little chapel — slide please Susana — at the foot of Mount Urgull, which the French destroyed in 1808, during the Peninsular War.
Sorry? No, I don’t think so. But a good question.
Slide. When the two boys approached the gate — Goya recounts this in a letter to Martín in 1802 – Martín whispered to Paco that the girls were prostitutes. Martín lived with his rich aunt. His parents were long dead. He had, according to his letter, slept with a servant woman named Maria de Pilar on several occasions, starting when he was thirteen. He was the man of the house.
Paco the boy sees only the girls’ beauty. His chest is tight. He is listening — with dread? — to the words coming out of Martín’s mouth. The pick of the kill on the two boys’ belts, this is what Martín seems to offer the girls, bloodied partridge, snipe and grouse, maybe a rabbit or two. Black Maria smiles at Paco. Paco’s eyes are dropped to the dog. The terms of the transaction are agreed upon. Paco wants to disappear into the wall. He prays for a miracle. Earlier today he sketched these dogs — slide — attacking a bull tied to a stake. The crowd roars.
In 1763, he mentioned in a letter two sketches of the Marias, naked, done for an unknown friend. The sketches are lost.
Slide.
The city’s baptism records list Martín’s date of birth as November 12, 1747. He died in 1803, a quarter-century before Paco. His death certificate is lost.
Slide.
Next to this first image on the frieze, just to its right, I think it’s the next side please, we see what happens next — there — the royal guard on horseback led by a trumpeter and a drummer galloping through the gate. The frieze is sequential, reading it is confusing, so many dogs, so many Pacos, you have to be told how to read this. Eight white horses clothed in red, the Guards in red grenadier caps and blue coats faced with red, or yellow coats faced with green, white and red, and wide red cuffs, and wide red collars.
The girls by now have scattered. The dog barks and pulls hard at the lead. The royal convoy follows the royal guardsmen. The new Spanish king and his wife are in the first carriage. This is only their second week in Spain; it is likely that they are homesick for Italy, that the blighted landscape of this uncultivated país de mierde out the window offends them, the poverty, the dullness, the wicked backwardness of the half-starved crowds staring back at them from the side of the dirt road. What’s more, the queen — slide — this is her a few years later — go back please Susana — most of her retinue and the infantes and infantas in the next three carriages are covered in erupted sores. Three of the children have encephalitis; two will not survive the week. The only members of the party in possession of some vigour are the young Prince of Asturias — slide — and his father — slide — the new king, who has taken the name Carlos III, and whose enthusiasm for this new dominion, only his because of the death of — slide — an issueless, half-mad half-brother, Ferdinand VI, a fortnight ago in El Escorial, is instantly invigorated by the sight of freshly killed game.
Slide. The king is sitting up, pounding his stick against the carriage roof to make the driver stop, straightening the powdered wig under his black tricorne hat, holding a pomander to his nose and opening the carriage door.
“Let us see!” he shouts. “Facci vedere!” He’s more Italian than Spanish. He corrects himself, switches from Italian to Spanish. “¡Déjame ver!” All of this is written above his head on the frieze — slide — as if in a comic strip. The boys are alarmed by the sight of him: thin, long-limbed, owl-headed — slide — striding towards them in red velvet sashed with the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Order of the Holy Ghost; and more so again when the young prince, panoplied in leather and breasted with the embossed head of the Medusa, jumps out of the third carriage.
Slide. The greyhound bares its teeth.
Slide. Martín, thinking of the game laws, tries to hide his catch. The king gives the dog his hand to lick.
The dialogue is from a letter Paco wrote Martín three decades later.
‘A nobleman’s dog,’ says the king.
Martín, down on his knees, makes the sign of the cross, staring at the dirt.
“Questi ladri li hanno rubati,” says the young prince, who is ten, pointing with his stick at the birds on the boy’s belt.
These thieves poached these.
Slide. Paco holds up his gun, as if to offer it, or to show what method he used to acquire his catch, perhaps he’s not sure. Slide. Three royal guardsmen leap from their mounts and draw their swords. The dog barks. The king smiles behind his pomander. The prince studies Paco’s face, which is mud and blood-spattered. Paco studies the plump, rounded face of the prince.
Slide.
“I am not a poacher, your highness,” says Paco. This is the story Goya will tell his grandson, and also what is written above his head. “Soy Francisco Goya, a noble-born hidalgo and a painter. You are my king and you, Sire, my prince, and I will make you both immortal.’
Slide. The king laughs. Goya smiles, bows low.
Slide.
A guard knocks him to the ground with the flat side of his sword.
Me importan un carajo las pinturas (as long as you write about their background)