The deaf court painter
Francisco Goya (1746–1828) is the proof that Romanticism is a mood and not a movement, because he belonged to no movement at all. He was the court painter to a crumbling Spanish monarchy, a man who had spent years turning out cheerful tapestry cartoons (full-size design drawings that weavers copied to make tapestries, not comic pictures), and then in 1793 a violent illness left him stone deaf. Cut off inside his own silence, he turned away from the prettiness and toward the nightmare, and he got there a generation before anyone in Paris. He had no school, no followers, and no manifesto. He had a country falling apart and an unblinking eye.
When reason falls asleep
The turn shows first in print. In 1799 Goya published Los Caprichos, a set of eighty etchings (prints pulled from a design bitten into a metal plate with acid) skewering the superstition, vanity, and cruelty of Spanish society. Plate 43 became its motto. A man, an artist, has slumped asleep over his desk, and out of the dark behind him pours a swarm of owls and bats and a watching wildcat. The caption reads El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. The Spanish word sueño means both “sleep” and “dream,” so the line reads two ways at once: the sleep of reason produces monsters, and the dream of reason does too. Either way it is the Enlightenment’s confidence stood on its head. Reason is not in command here. It has nodded off, and the dark has come out to play.
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He could still paint the court itself with the same cold honesty. The Family of Charles IV (1800–01) lines the Spanish royal family up in gold and medals, with Goya himself half in shadow at his easel behind them, a quiet nod to Velázquez doing the same thing in Las Meninas a century and a half before. Later critics loved to call the royals grotesque, as if Goya had smuggled a caricature past his stupid patrons. That reading is interpretation, not documented fact: the family voiced no displeasure, and one school of scholars thinks he simply painted them as they saw themselves. It is a sharper picture if you drop the wink and let the plain, unflattered faces do their own work.
A firing squad in the dark
Then Napoleon’s armies came over the Pyrenees, and Goya found his great subject. On 2 May 1808 the people of Madrid rose against the French occupation; the next night the French shot the captured rebels in batches outside the city. Six years later Goya painted the reprisal as The Third of May 1808 (1814), nearly nine feet tall and over eleven wide, the size the academy reserved for the deaths of saints and heroes. He spent it on anonymous slaughter.
Look at how it is built. On the right the firing squad is a faceless machine, a row of identical rifles and the backs of identical hats, no man to blame and no man to plead with. On the left, the victims: a heap of the already-shot, a crowd hiding its eyes, and at the center one figure in a blazing white shirt thrown into the light of a single lantern, arms flung wide. He is lit like a martyr and his open hands carry the faint dark marks of a crucifixion, but there is no heaven over him, only a sleeping town and a black sky. The art historian Kenneth Clark called this the first great picture that could be called “revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention.” It is often called the first modern painting of war, and you can see why: no glory, no flag, no order to the killing, just a man about to die and a machine that will do it without looking at his face.
He was no pure outsider, though, and the picture is sharper if you do not pretend he was. Goya was a survivor first. He had kept his court salary under Joseph Bonaparte, the French-installed king he painted the massacre against, and when the Spanish crown came back he swore his loyalty to the restored Ferdinand VII and went on collecting it. The man who painted the most unforgiving picture of the French occupation had served the occupiers and the monarchy both, the deaf court painter who outlasted every regime that ran Madrid. That is not hypocrisy so much as the cost of staying alive and employed while the country changed hands around him, and it is part of what makes the unflinching honesty of the work so strange. He saw everything clearly and signed up with whoever was winning.
The murals nobody was meant to see
The last and darkest turn Goya painted for an audience of one: himself. Around 1819 he bought a farmhouse outside Madrid (it was already nicknamed the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man, by coincidence, after a previous owner), and between about 1819 and 1823, old and bitter and living through another wave of repression, he covered its walls directly in oil with fourteen of the most frightening images in European art. He never titled them. He never exhibited them. He never meant them to leave the house. The names we use are all later, hung on the murals by a friend who catalogued them after Goya’s death.
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The blackest of them hung in his dining room. We call it Saturn Devouring His Son: the old Roman Titan Saturn (the Greeks called him Cronus), who in the myth ate his own children to keep one from overthrowing him, caught here mid-bite, eyes blown wide with something between terror and madness, cramming a small headless body into his mouth. This is what Goya chose to look at over dinner. The murals survived because, decades after his death, a restorer named Salvador Martínez Cubells peeled them off the plaster and transferred them to canvas around 1874 for a French baron who owned the house. They went on show in Paris, and eventually fourteen of them came to the Prado in Madrid, where they hang now. (A fifteenth wandered off into a private collection.) Goya had painted the nightmare with no one to see it, which is about as far from a manifesto as painting gets.