62 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
nearby, but you can neither understand
the reason for its activation nor find it
to turn it off.
Goya didn’t emerge as a master
through a neat evolution of period styles.
He can seem at once decadent and in-
novative, with some lingering tropes of
the late Baroque and the rococo and the
brassiness of the then fashionable neo-
classicism along with utterly original
freshets of Romanticism. Spanish art
had become provincial. The country’s
leading art educator was the mediocre
German painter Anton Raphael Mengs,
who promulgated a sort of housebroken
neoclassicism. In 1778, when Goya was
thirty-two, he turned to Spain’s own
lapsed glories, with a set of etched cop-
ies of seventeenth-century masterpieces
by Velázquez, skeletonizing the art of
the painterly demiurge in incised line
with washes of aquatint. The hair-shirt
exercise puzzled some of his fellow-art-
ists. The renderings are spot on, but their
reductions of color to line and shading
are like a broadcast of the “Hallelujah”
Chorus over a kid’s walkie-talkie. I think
that Goya sought gains for painting
through grasping what had been lost
to it. No longer equal to illusions of re-
ality, paintings were fated to become
objects, real in themselves, of a certain
kind. Rather than forge a signature style,
Goya practiced a temperamental abne-
gation of anything usual. This kept—
and keeps—him impossible to pin down:
a deserter from the marching ranks of
the Old Masters, forever on the loose.
An homage to Velázquez’s touch-
stone “Las Meninas” (1656) figures in
perhaps the most beautiful group por-
trait ever painted. “The Family of Car-
los IV” (1800-01) stands out in Goya’s
portraiture as a one-off masterpiece on
purpose, affirming for good the justice
of his recent elevation to the first court
painter. In the background, the artist
gazes out from behind, it would appear,
the very canvas that we behold, suggest-
ing that he’s working from a mirrored
view of the scene—an unlikely conceit
that seems meant mainly, and wittily, to
recall Velázquez’s similar self-portrayal
in “Las Meninas.” (The jape amounts to
a proto-modernist instance of art about
art.) Thirteen lavishly clad persons, from
the fifty-two-year-old monarch to a babe
in arms, share a room awash in the softly
shadowed, caressing light of a golden af-
ternoon. They assume informal attitudes
of everyday aplomb, except for a woman
who looks away as if distracted in the pic-
tured instant. She represents a princess
of Naples who was the bride-to-be of
Carlos IV’s son Ferdinand VII; her looks
weren’t yet known in Spain. She faces
a muddy painting, on the room’s back
wall, that made reference to Sodom and
Gomorrah. Some modern commentarydetects, in her Lot’s-wife posture, a crit-
ical stab at the corruption of the monar-
chic state—as if no one at the time could
have noticed it. And doesn’t Carlos IV
look clownish? Your call. The more ger-
mane point is that he looks like—be-
cause he is—the King.
The tacit sensibilities of a given era
tend to elude subsequent generations. I
suspect that Goya’s sophisticated con-
temporaries found his occasional mis-
chief chic. Tomlinson writes that to as-
sign personal perspectives to Goya’s work
for the court “is to impose values that
are not of his time”—a familiar defense
of historical figures who are judged
harshly by present-day standards, but
apt, as well, for an ill-fitting halo. When
we presume agreement with Goya’s sup-
posed politics, we drift afield of his ex-
traordinary complexity. What it was like
to be him crouches behind an inefface-
able question mark.T
he lower-middle-class son of a gilder,
Goya studied painting in his be-
loved home town of Zaragoza, north-
east of Madrid. When he was twenty-
three, he went to Italy and spent two
knockabout years of which little is known.
(But he won second prize in a compe-
tition in Parma for a painting of Han-
nibal crossing the Alps.) In 1773, he mar-
ried María Josefa Bayeu, a sister of his
elder Zaragozan Francisco Bayeu, who
was then a court painter to Carlos III.
Among several miscarriages, Goya and
Josefa had seven children, only one of
whom survived childhood. Does thatconcatenation of tragedies help explain
the radical pessimism of Goya’s later
works—most shocking, the eighty-two
engravings assembled as “The Disasters
of War” (1810-20), which he made in re-
action to the Peninsular War of Bour-
bon Spain, Portugal, and guerrilla bands,
backed by Great Britain, against the
French occupation? Other psychic scars
may be adduced: Goya’s witnessing of
public executions by garrote and, in the
case of a woman whose face he remem-
bered and drew decades later, a burning
at the stake. And sights of inmates from
Zaragoza’s mental asylum stayed with
him. But any traumas hung fire as he
launched himself on a professional ca-
reer with seething ambition, adapting
Bayeu’s rococo manner, but with a faster,
more spontaneous hand.
In 1772, for his first major commis-
sion, Goya frescoed a dome in the im-
mense, new Zaragoza basilica of El Pilar.
His drawings for the design displeased
the local cognoscenti, leading to a sug-
gestion that Bayeu should touch them
up in the correct fashion. Having made
grudging modifications, Goya completed
the project on his own, but he was sum-
marily dismissed from further work at
El Pilar. The affront initiated five years
of bad blood between the brothers-in-
law. (Tomlinson reports that today a vis-
itor to El Pilar can behold the Goya
ceiling in full illumination, while a nearby
one by Bayeu hovers in gloom.) The hu-
miliation, staining Goya’s reputation in
his home town, nettled him for most of
his life, even after Zaragoza was obliged
to embrace him as an illustrious native
son. Nothing like it happened again.
What most dramatically did happen,
starting in 1793 with the small paintings
on tin that he made (and found a mar-
ket for) of what Tomlinson summarizes
as “natural disasters, cannibals, mad-
houses, and murder,” was the emergence
of a blistering negativity. The works co-
incided with spells of freely admitted
anxiety and depression—“at times rav-
ing in a mood that I myself cannot stand,”
Goya wrote to a friend—but there’s
nothing deranged about the paintings.
Strongly styled, they process rather than
express his disturbances: correlatives set
outside himself. They were followed, in
1797, by the start of a series of eighty sa-
tirical engravings of Spanish life, “Los
Caprichos,” which proved widely pop-