The Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828) indeed resembles Beethoven in the monochrome self-portrait he immortalized sometime between 1795 and 1797, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The stern countenance framed by the lion-like mane hairstyle strikes a chord with the composer’s genius and untamed madness. Each man by then was becoming deaf. Withdrawing steeply into their inner worlds, the monsters that reason creates while asleep tormented them both beyond description.
Goya’s line strokes here, in ink wash on paper, had already acquired that trademark interest in structuring form after the castings of light and shade. He had buttressed his jagged upbringing in the modernity of Titian, Rembrandt and, above all, Velázquez, followed by the expected study stint in Italy. After landing by chance an internship at the newly built royal court in Madrid, he soon found in Nature a style that undressed better than any schooling the rather tickled flesh and spirit of his beloved Spain. Then, in 1808, the French invaded the country.
The Absolute War
The ailing Goya, who had intermittently sought solace in his idyllic vignettes of Spanish life, would become the chief visual chronicler on the disasters of a new warfare concept—the absolute war—that blew into world-scale dimensions the spatial geometry of human conduct. Its absoluteness strove on the extent into which it refashioned the “representations of space and the spaces of representation” (Santiáñez) while operating in the Spanish Monarchy, specifically, a drawback from the original tenets that inspired the French Revolution.
The Peninsular War (1808-14)—this is how historians coined it from the onset—coursed Goya’s latest and most poignant style shift, granting he also synthesized among many other motives the declining Zeitgeist of the Age of Reason. His art had long begun to assume a “radical inversion” (Bozal 234) that proved to pierce far into the unfolding global weave hidden behind the “shameful waste of life” borne by the Napoleonic Campaigns.
Dynamic Typologies
Goya had joined in his early twenties a troupe of bullfighters and stored a wealth of reminiscences while journeying throughout the seedier inland of Spain. Among the greatest lessons he would often retrieve from this time was how to typify the collectivity in its full range of breath, complete with its premonitory blunders and vices. Before the war broke out, he had hardened enough to face without blinking that “ambivalence of feeling” which acolytes from the Vienna School of Psychoanalysis say compels humans to scathe and kill one another.
In his 1800 painting of the Family of Charles IV, Goya portrays himself judiciously detached in the dimmed background, toward the left. Here, as the rickety aristocracy and the Court clammed into historical denial, causing unfathomable bloodsheds, he decries the sovereigns’ moral ignobility by equalizing their dolt-faced stances. Fourteen years later, in his now quasi epitomical painting entitled The Third of May 1808, Goya typifies his fellow civilians by highlighting their varied reactions before the French firing squad “machine.” Without a speck of bathos, the victims of the fatal outcome become the sole heroic protagonist whose complexity shines beyond the lamp’s illumination.
Goya’s Contemporaneity
In what Albert Camus may have consented to call the “paradox of the absurd,” Goya’s late radical inversion during the conflict anticipated a home template by which others in the region and abroad could mirror their own plight. He sided with his guerrilla patriots, overtly in his Sierra de la Tardienta paintings (Making Gunpowder, Making Bullets), but seldom relaxed his forthright verve against the livor of cruelty in general.
The absolute war rationalized distortion in its representations of space, ushering Goya to decamp objective allegory on behalf of a formal rebellion not confined to any logic of discourse other than that which ignites from its most imaginative spaces of representation. On a par, the “noise in my head” and other maladies forced upon him approaches that forecasted aesthetic breakthroughs not yet fully mainstreamed until the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Beethoven, who retreated from humans in order to understand them better, believed that anyone who tells a lie lacks a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup. Goya at the end stepped back even further and sought exile from a Spain that reverted to authoritarian rule, but his gaze refused to lie and hence made a rich soup for a critical understanding of the monsters that reason creates.
References
- Bozal, Valeriano. Historia del arte en España. Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 1972.
- Santiáñez, Nil. Goya/Clausewitz: paradigmas de la guerra absoluta. Barcelona: Ediciones Alpha Decay, 2009.
Egberto Almenas - Egberto Almenas is a literary and art scholar, author of four books of essays and a frequent contributor in both Spanish and English ...
