One abnormally born.

I am back in Paris after New York and before that, Amsterdam, and before that, the Sarthe and the Cévennes, none of which I’ve written about yet.

What follows below, after the Four Horses of Goya, is set in Spain, which, bizarrely, I haven’t set foot in since 2014 – and that was only overnight.

It is also set mainly in the 19th century, which I missed entirely.

Like all of my weird Goya inventions, it is a stand-alone piece – part of a cycle of texts linked by character, time and place, but otherwise entirely self-contained.

If you haven’t read any yet, you can start here.

You certainly don’t have to read them in order.

(Because there is no order.)

Of course, you don’t have to read them at all.

But I’d like you to.

I’d also like you to let me know what you think of them, and if you like them to share them with others.

And if you haven’t yet:

He finds horses less compelling than the men that subdue them, the lands they gallop through and the crowds they trample. This is perhaps because he has never had a meaningful relationship with a real horse, though he was once thrown and knocked senseless by one, an old dray from the farm that reared and panicked at the sight of a brigand’s head just then cresting the nearest hill haloed in blinding sunlight. This was in the autumn of 1773 and he was on the road to his first official position in Madrid, a paid apprenticeship in Mengs’ studio. He had barely left the gates when the old dray started, threw him to the ground and would have crushed him under hoof – and with him our story – if the brigand, who he later saw executed in the Plaza del Sol, hadn’t picked up the loose reins, soothed the skittered animal with soft words and led it away, along with his filled-to-bursting saddlebags, which contained not only food, water, clothing and money but a miniature of the Our Virgin Lady of the Pillar and two portraits of his parents, which to this day have never been recovered. He drew on the experience for the composition of Conversion of Saul of Tarsus (1788-90), the largest of his three frescoes in the Archbishop’s Palace of Alcalá de Henares, which were all destroyed by fire during the Spanish Civil War.

All his subsequent investigations of horses did not come directly from nature but were prismed through other painters’ works, most notably the foreshortened perspectives in the Royal Collection’s Titian (Emperor Charles V on Horseback), Velazquez (the Equestrian portrait of Philip IV, Equestrian portrait of Margarita de Austria and Equestrian portrait of Isabel de Borbón) and Wouwerman (Horses startled by a Dog), and the chalk studies he did in Rome of the Carracci frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese.

This dependency on his predecessors embarrassed him. “I do not follow methods.” He would say this but not exactly believe it to be true. “There is little point, and much poison, in burdening tender youth with rules, with the dull and servile study of trickeries gleaned from textbooks and applied to plaster models of Greek statues. Art requires passion first, then freedom, not servitude, oppression and imposition. This is true of painting and all noble endeavours.”

“God, devil, heaven and hell, here the painter’s brush invariably outperforms the poet’s pen,” he wrote across the bottom of a pencil rendering of an angel on horseback. “This is not just a young man winged but the captured and created angel of the Lord, with the power to move men, redeem sinners, and convert the wicked to the path of goodness.”

The horse, however? It is a botch.

To him, for reasons we nor he will ever fully know, horses are among nature’s most mysterious creatures. Mere tools, means of haulage and transport, power for ploughs and carriages; and at the same time inexpressibly noble, the embodiment of animal grace. Thus unfathomed, he is, therefore, unable to represent them to his satisfaction in anything even approaching their truth, nor capture even the barest essentials of their character – terrible and sublime, swallowing the ground with fierceness and rage, necks clothed with thunder, steam emanating from their forelocks and the quivering power of their flanks, and place these properly into the picture plane with any emotive force. As vivid flatnesses, they fail. He can’t equipoise them realistically and dramatically into two-dimensional space the way any half-talented Old Master could with his eyes closed. This is the harshest truth. Human, equine and other – anatomy has never been his strong suit. He is particularly bad at hands and arms. The effortless perfection in Renaissance academies and studios unnerved him when he first encountered it in Italy, as did the works he spent his days and nights with while cataloguing the masterworks in the royal residences. He knew at a young age that no matter how hard he strived, he would never match the mastery of Titian or Tintoretto, and David, his contemporary, could best him with a brush held by his feet. Such heights were not available to him. Carracci, who had revived painting that since the time of Raphael had fallen into decline, whom Goya championed for the liberality of his genius as a teacher who left each disciple free to proceed following the inclination of his spirit without determining for any to follow his style or method, and made only those corrections intended to attain the imitation of the truth, would not have given him a place in his Academia.

“You perhaps think too much.”

Mariquita said this, jarring him out of his daydream.

“And you not enough.”

The girl took his hand and daubed the spittle at the side of his chin.

“Where were we in your lesson?” He said.

“You were telling me what is important,” she said.

“And what is not important. Perspective, for example, and geometry. These will come later. As for anatomy. You and I are artists, not doctors. We don’t learn anything more by putting our hands into the dead man’s excavated entrails.”