CHAPTER 9
Anthony J. Cascardi
A great many accounts of Goya’s career begin with an outline of his beginnings as a young painter in Zaragoza under the tutelage of José Luzán, his travels to Italy, and his subsequent return to Spain, where he enjoyed the support of his brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu, in Zaragoza and in Madrid. In Madrid, the neoclassicist painter Antón Raphael Mengs, then official court painter, reigned supreme in the world of official art and served as the de facto arbiter of taste. These early years are treated primarily for their biographical interest, and with but a few exceptions (including some surprising images in Goya’s Italian sketchbook that I have occasion to mention below) there is little reason to regard them otherwise. Goya’s career as an artist of consequence begins with his first court commissions—with the paintings he made between 1775 and 1792 as “cartoons” for tapestries that were to hang in various royal residences—once his formidable talent had already gained some recognition. From there it is common, and not entirely mistaken, to chart the evolution of a body of work that grows increasingly difficult and more modern as it grows increasingly dark.
For one understanding of Goya’s work, the tapestry cartoons are indeed an important place to begin, not least because they model many of the subjects that Goya returns to with a far more critical eye over the course of his later career. But there is more to Goya’s work than the story of an artist’s darkening view of the world can tell, and more also than can be explained in terms of Goya’s refusal of the obligatory cheerfulness of his tapestry commissions on occasions when he was free to work as he wished. I say this in full view of Goya’s own statements about the importance of invention in art, both in his announcement for the Caprichos in the Diario de Madrid on 6 February 1799 (“inventadas y grabadas al agua fuerte por Don Francisco Goya [invented and engraved in aquatint by Don Francisco Goya]”) and in his earlier speech to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where he famously proclaimed that “there are no rules in painting.” As he went on to say on that occasion, it is less important to adhere to convention than to recognize talent and to allow it to flourish freely (to “reward and protect he who excels in [the arts]; to hold in esteem the true Artist, to allow free rein to the genius of students who wish to learn them, without oppression, nor imposition of methods”).1 This statement is largely about Goya’s aversion to academic pedagogy and makes sense in the context of the academy’s expressed interest in reform. But there is something beyond the endorsement of raw talent and unstructured learning that needs to be taken into account when gauging Goya’s commitment to invention. To say that the Caprichos are invented means of course that Goya did not have prior models for the images. But equally important to grasp is the way in which Goya himself began to confront a series of inherited assumptions regarding the making of images, assumptions of the most fundamental sort. His works often incorporate particular views of the world as part of their thematic content; that is one basis for their critical work, and it is especially important in works that address the social world, including the Caprichos. But in addition to this, I want to suggest, Goya came relatively early in his career to reflect on the means by which any view of the world, including any view put forward under the guise of art, is constructed—invented—rather than “natural,” and invented in ways that are often concealed.
This awareness may well have been enabled by the fact that eighteenth-century perspective was not as normalizing as one might assume. Yet it was precisely the invented and constructed nature of the work of art that was largely concealed by the three traditions that provided the most important contexts for Goya’s early works: the tradition of religious painting, largely neoclassical in its formalism; the tradition of picturesque naturalism that forms the background for many of the tapestry cartoons; and the tradition of late baroque illusionism, best exemplified by Tiepolo’s large-scale frescoes. The tapestry cartoons seem to accept as normative the world as it presents itself to the members of established society. The point of departure for the cartoons is the normative ideal of a transparent gaze, even though it is one that Goya began to question almost from the start. Hence one prominent Goya scholar, Valeriano Bozal, could write of the picturesque background of these works that “the painter . . . ought to paint as if the image were the direct product of his gaze—an attentive, interested, and pleasant gaze—which, rather than eliminate liveliness, valorizes it.”2 My argument in what follows here suggests that Goya did not take the image-space of secular art for granted but in fact understood it as a construction, and perhaps even as a fantasy, sustained on painting’s side by techniques of sculptural modeling and coloration inherited from the traditions of religious art and baroque illusionism. The contrast between “sacred” and “secular” domains, and, more important, the idea of a passage from one domain to the other, leads to a recognition that there are contradictions within secular space, the most important being that it seems never to be fully demystified.
To understand something about how Goya came to reckon with the constructedness of the image, I proceed with a discussion of his religious paintings and a related body of his works that poses questions about the power of belief in aesthetics and otherwise. The main body of Goya’s work belongs to the secular tradition, but he seems to have understood that secular space had to be won before it could be called into question: It was won through a process of secularization that involved, among other things, a recognition of the necessary tensions between aesthetic plausibility and religious belief. With this came a self-consciousness about such things as perspective, composition, and the beholder’s standpoint, all of which reveal themselves as innerworldly constructions, not as divinely ordained for nature. Goya seems to have been deeply engaged with such questions despite the fact that, roughly from Alberti onward, the reigning principles of image-making assumed the naturalness of a secular point of view. As Norman Bryson pointed out in Image and Gaze, Albertian perspective served to normativize the set of techniques by which painting could support the fiction of a “natural standpoint.”3 To understand that the “naturalness” of the beholder’s standpoint is itself constructed implied something quite different from the acceptance of Albertian principles. In Goya (though certainly not in Goya alone) the representation of a natural-looking image carries with it an awareness that the image was itself a product of invention and that it has a social and material basis. It is hardly surprising to see Goya move rapidly away from the picturesque naturalness that informs the tapestry cartoons, since that aesthetic was designed to conceal these very facts.
Moreover, the process of secularization is one that seems never to be complete. Various forces that may be associated with the spirit seem to persist, in many forms, even within an apparently autonomous, fully secular space. The spirit world has a demonic afterlife that invariably throws the secular world off-kilter, reminding it of its own precarious status as a contradictory collection of provisional and sometimes obscure, even irrational, practices and beliefs. As Goya was also quick to recognize, this was something that the members of secular society seemed surprisingly unable to see. The persistence of “official” religion within an increasingly secular world tells only part of the story; equally important is the way in which the winged demons of desire and self-deceit reoccupy the place of pretty angels, or in which sublime miracle scenes present themselves as the occasions of bloody horror.
A work that can provide a particularly insightful point of entry into some of these questions is the fresco ceiling in the church of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid (Figure 1). Goya completed the fresco in 1798, when he was already fifty-two, then deaf for six years, and at a high point in his artistic powers and prestige. The date of the work is of interest because it places the fresco as contemporaneous with the Caprichos, which were executed in 1797–98 and published in 1799. His success as a painter of cartoons for royal tapestries had earned him a significant reputation. There is speculation that the commission for the work in San Antonio may have been obtained through the intercession of one of his most prominent “enlightened” friends, Jovellanos, but Goya was by this time sufficiently well established to have secured it on his own. On the central dome of the church Goya represents the climactic scene from the key miracle in the life of Saint Anthony of Padua. The scene as Goya renders it is significant both because it is a secular setting of a miraculous event and because the work poses important questions about perspective, construction, and belief in painting.
According to popular legend and church accounts, including one that had just recently been translated into Spanish,4 the “background” story of the miracle is as follows. Anthony of Padua received news that his father, in Lisbon, had been accused of murder. In response, Anthony requested permission to take leave from his monastery in order to intercede on his father’s behalf. The story has it that the future saint made a miraculous flight to Lisbon and, once there, became the central actor in a dramatic courtroom scene. Confronting the trial judge, the saint demanded that the victim’s corpse be produced for questioning. Turning then to the corpse, Anthony asked the dead man to say for certain whether or not his father was the murderer. The corpse rose to reply “no,” and then sank back into his coffin, while the assembled courtroom crowd was seized with fear and awe.
Figure 1. Francisco Goya, Miracle of Saint Anthony, San Antonio de la Florida. Partial view. 1798. Royal Chapel of Saint Anthony of La Florida.
The central dome on which the miracle of Saint Anthony is painted (some 5.5m in diameter) is only a part of the overall decoration of the church of San Antonio. The central dome is flanked by four spandrels and four archivolts, where Goya painted angels who appear to “reveal” the miracle scene by retracting curtains (Figure 2). But these angels seem incongruous, if not irrelevant to the way in which Goya handles the image on the central dome. They are not set within an illusionistic version of heavenly space, as conventions of religious painting might have required, but are rather decorative ancillaries to a secular scene. The images inhabit different aesthetic regimes: The decorative angels in their peripheral, relatively constrained theatrical spheres, and the miracle in a central, open-air space. The two are scarcely in visual dialogue at all; indeed, the angels seem oddly to reveal a terrestrial scene that rises physically above them. One of the best commentators on Goya’s religious paintings, Fred Licht, remarks that there is something odd about the arrangement, something “sardonically heavy-handed in the way [these] shabby and rather dusty theatre-prop wings are stuck to the shoulder blades of Goya’s angels, just as there is something awkwardly prosaic in the fall of the draperies, which no longer flutter as if animated by the free winds of the heavens but fall to the ground like badly hemmed costumes.”5
Within the central dome itself, the sky above the miracle is left virtually blank. Moreover, the scene of the miracle forms only a part of the large central dome. The greater part of the dome is devoted to a series of figures who form a circle around its perimeter. What is often said about these figures is quite true, as far as it goes: that Goya removed the miracle of Saint Anthony from the context of the religious sublime so as to concentrate on a broad cross-section of “ordinary” Madrid society. This is a work that largely refuses the aesthetics of religious wonder even though it is a miracle scene. Notwithstanding the dramatic gestures of a few of the figures, which recall the theatricality of baroque imagery, with all its rhetorical emphases, this is a work in which a great many internal spectators seem to pay little attention to the miraculous event. Moreover, the circular composition makes it almost impossible to imagine the image as having a magnetic, visual center. As I suggest below, all these factors raise questions about the power of belief, both in relation to the implied force of the miracle and in relation to the task of painting.
Figure 2. Francisco Goya, Miracle of Saint Anthony, San Antonio de la Florida. Detail. 1798. Royal Chapel of Saint Anthony of La Florida.
Given the historical context and situation of the fresco, the incorporation of a group of figures drawn from contemporary society is hardly surprising. The work is secular in this ordinary sense. From its humble beginnings in the sixteenth century as little more than a devotional shrine, the church of San Antonio de la Florida had a history as the people’s place of worship. Legend has it that the simple sixteenth-century shrine was frequented by ordinary women who would stop there to pray on their way to the Manzanares River to do the daily washing. Some critics have remarked that women of this type figure directly in Goya’s painting; the suggestion is that the work was meant to acknowledge, if not to flatter, the ordinary churchgoers of Goya’s era. The edifice near the Manzanares where Goya painted the frescoes toward the very end of the eighteenth century was the result of numerous reconstructions and displacements on the site of the original shrine. A second chapel had been built, and the amplified structure was elevated to the status of church. Subsequently, the architect Churriguera was commissioned to construct a permanent and elaborate structure out of brick. Then, during the course of various improvements to the city of Madrid under Charles III, plans were made to improve the route on which that church stood, and so a new one was ordered built, still respecting the original place and traditions of worship, even while the structure was conceived on a substantially larger scale. The resulting neoclassical edifice where Goya painted his frescoes was opened in 1798, though not consecrated until 1799, a year after Goya had finished the work. He was working among the people who worshiped there, just after the builders had completed the construction of the space.
In his landmark study of the frescoes, Hans Rothe described the scene of the central dome as a “popular gathering” (“festejo popular”).6 More recently, Robert Hughes characterized it as “vernacular.”7 The scene impresses both because of the diversity of the individual types represented in it and because of the intensity with which they are rendered. There is energy in the brushwork and in the handling of the paint itself (a topic to which I return below), as well as a power of insight into the differences among social types that goes well beyond convention. The women who are grouped in constellations of twos and threes appear to be young majas (stylish women); a haggard celestina (go-between) stands nearby. There is also an older man beside the saint (who some speculate may be the accused man, Anthony’s father), as well as a younger woman who attends the miracle scene at close range (the saint’s mother, perhaps), a toothless beggar, an aged man with a white beard, shadowy figures fleeing in the background, a blind man with a staff, a boy who straddles the painted railing in trompe l’oeil fashion (Figure 3) and, at a point in the circle directly opposite the saint, a figure who stands up high on a ledge, his hands outstretched and raised as if in wonder or awe, or in imitation of a priestly gesture that rhymes with the figure of the woman who faces the saint directly. He has been dubbed the “ecstatic one”; his secular clothing and his mystical posture seem to demonstrate the effects of spiritual forces working at a distance within the secular world.
Figure 3. Francisco Goya, Miracle of Saint Anthony, San Antonio de la Florida. Detail. 1798. Royal Chapel of Saint Anthony of La Florida
But other details seem purposely to avoid spiritual connotation. Several critics have compared the white cloth that Goya drapes over the railing to the banners that might be seen hanging over the wall of a bullring (Figure 4). And yet there is no attempt to set this scene in any particular location. The central scene and the surrounding figures are placed neither in Lisbon, where legend has it that the miracle took place, nor in Madrid, where these figures belong socially. (If a bullring is the suggestion, the scene could just as easily be imagined as set in either place.) The background of the image is a landscape with rocks that rise up as bulks of color, verging on sheer abstraction. There is a tree, whose form is vaguely reminiscent of the earlier tapestry cartoons, especially in the way in which the limbs and leaves are outlined; but this tree bends to cover the curvature of the dome, not with the wind. The sky is vacant of anything heavenly; indeed, the space that rises up to the central cupola is remarkably bereft of allusion of any sort.
Figure 4. Francisco Goya, Miracle of Saint Anthony, San Antonio de la Florida. Detail. 1798. Royal Chapel of Saint Anthony of La Florida.
The principal element in the foreground of the work is the painted railing, which is set significantly above the lower edge of the dome, as if to “contain” the entire spectacle. But from what, or from whom are these figures being held back? What space does the railing divide? The effect is theatrical and wholly secular. “Above” and “below” seem to have no spiritual meanings here. Nor is this railing anything like the architectural elements of so many painted baroque ceilings, which help sustain the illusion of a heavenly space, often pictured in the form of a sky with billowy clouds where weightless figures reel and tumble, relatively free of care. Goya invokes, but mostly in order to invert and finally to refuse, the kind of illusionism that would make the painted figures in this fresco appear to defy the laws of gravity by floating in space. The posture of the risen victim suggests that it is gravity, as much as death itself, that the miracle must overcome. This miracle scene is indeed set on a terrestrial plane, and yet it is paradoxically located overhead in relation to the spectator standing in the church. This paradox is confronted directly in the composition of the image. Consider the boy who has climbed on top of the railing and straddles it. One cannot easily say where this boy would land if he were to fall. Indeed, the image as a whole seems to refuse any analysis that would be coherent both with the figures within it and with the beholder’s position beneath it. All this goes to say that the narrative of the secularized miracle stands in tension with the visual space in which it is constructed and with the standpoint from which it must be viewed. Those, it seems, are among the irreducible aesthetic facts it presents.
As a point of comparison, consider Tiepolo’s fresco ceilings. In the course of his book Tiepolo Pink, Roberto Calasso described these works as “airy and intoxicating.” This is quite true: It is precisely their airiness that makes Tiepolo’s frescoes seem so invulnerable to doubt. “The sweeping range, the invincible sense of lightness, a coefficient of antigravity”8 make them part of a visual world that counts on principles of belief that simply do not hold in Goya’s work. How else, other than by an aesthetics of belief, might one explain the exotic allegorical representations of Asia, Africa, America, and Europe in Tiepolo’s vast fresco ceiling for the Treppenhaus of the Residenz of the prince-bishops of Würzburg? (Figure 5). And how else except by an aesthetics of belief might one explain Tiepolo’s many images of religious apparitions and secular apotheoses—of the Pisani family, of Aeneas, of the Barbaro family, and, in the Royal Palace in Madrid, of Spain itself? All these works rely on a form of belief that allows Tiepolo to fashion illusionistic spaces that would be utterly implausible on virtually any other terms.
Figure 5. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Allegory of the Planets and Continents. 1752. Oil on canvas, 73 × 54-7/8 in. (185.4 × 139.4 cm). Würzburg Residenz.
In painting the frescoes for San Antonio, Goya would certainly have had Tiepolo in mind, not least because Tiepolo had painted what was then the most important fresco in Madrid, the ceiling of the throne room of the Royal Palace (1764, Figure 6). Although it may sound surprising to say so, Tiepolo was in many ways both a more secular artist than Goya—secular sometimes to the point of pagan in his adherence to the mythological world—and more of a believer, at least in matters aesthetic. Indeed, the grounds of that “belief” remained surprisingly intact even among painters who were aware, through Alberti, of the mechanics of perspective. (The Renaissance painter Uccello, for example, found something miraculous in perspective.) To the extent that his large frescoes convey a buoyant faith in the subjects they treat—whether allegorical, epic, or religious in nature—that faith finds its aesthetic supports in the way that Tiepolo manages the use of color and natural light. Indeed, there are specific effects of light that depend in crucial ways on the particular interiors for which his works were created. The seeming naturalness of the light was one way that Tiepolo could manage to render otherwise improbable and exotic subjects with such apparent ease. In his most successful works, the natural light creates a context for the display of bodies and forms that in turn produces a remarkable equality among figures of all types—angels, heroes, gods, and kings all alike. As Calasso remarked, in this world of light “the ecclesiastics and the aristocratic families, the courts and the dynasties all move away. They become so many pretexts. So what is left, then? The pure exhibition of the world, with all its apparatus of ceremonies and fatuousness”9—and, one might add, without the contradictions that Goya found impossible to ignore in such compositions.
Figure 6. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Glory of Spain. 1762–66. 2,700 × 1,000 cm. Throne Room, Palacio Real, Madrid.
Consider again the enormous Treppenhaus ceiling, said to be the largest secular ceiling fresco in all of Europe. The exoticism associated with Asia, Africa, and America is scarcely diminished by the more prosaic imagery that Europe is accorded. Moreover, the painted light circulates freely throughout the entire work, in part because the natural light of the remarkable Treppenhaus allowed for it. Tiepolo’s fresco for the throne room in Madrid, The Glory of Spain, was by contrast substantially less compelling in its use of light, in part because the natural light in the space was far less supple. As Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall remarked,
[Tiepolo] could work with mobile, structured light of many types, even when it came to quite intractable forms. What Tiepolo could not work with was inert light. In the huge Throne Room in Madrid, for example, the ambient lighting for The Glory of Spain is a morose and single-track affair from deep-set windows low down on one side only. . . . One of the things that defeated the attempt to rejuvenate subject matter from his earlier years was clearly the limp site lighting.10
It is altogether possible, even likely, that Goya had seen Tiepolo’s throne room ceiling before he painted the San Antonio frescoes. Goya had served as painter to the king (Pintor del Rey) since 1786, where he was employed along with Ramón Bayeu to make the cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Works. As of 1789 Goya was court painter. (He was named first court painter the year after the San Antonio frescoes were completed.) If Goya had indeed seen the ceiling in the throne room, as seems likely to have been the case, then it is entirely possible that the disparity between what Tiepolo wanted to achieve with effects of light in The Glory of Spain and what he was actually able to accomplish may have helped Goya consolidate whatever doubts he might already have had about proceeding with a fresco according to the conventions that Tiepolo epitomized. Without the play of light to lend a semblance of naturalness to such implausible compositions as The Glory of Spain, Tiepolo’s conventions could seem improbable or absurd. A critical intelligence such as Goya’s would have easily been led to question them. Manet later referred to them as “boring.”11
To return to Goya’s frescoes: The railing that girds the scene of the central dome of San Antonio is but one of several elements that pose problems for determining the most fundamental things about the image, including the perspective from which it asks to be understood. What form of aesthetic intelligence does it require of the beholder? To concentrate on the different groups of figures within the image, notwithstanding their fascinating and powerful social typology, may obscure some of the larger enigmas of the work, including those of perspective and composition. These are the means through which Goya came to confront the question of what it meant—of what it meant for painting as an art—to represent a miracle within the context of the contemporary secular world. The principles of visual perspective, which are innerworldly, stand at odds with the very idea of a miracle, which requires formidable powers of imagination, not to say belief, to support the idea of an efficacious spiritual force acting in the human world. This was a question that Goya was to address in numerous other works, including the night visions of the Caprichos, his images of truth and time, various scenes of witches, and his enigmatic architectural projects. In those works he raises the question of whether a secular perspective of any kind can finally account for everything that a critical intelligence needs to engage in art. In the San Antonio frescoes the question is whether the presentation of a miracle to a group of ordinary madrileños can also make itself intelligible to the beholder of the painting, who stands in a position—both literally and figuratively—that lies outside the work and that seems to be irreconcilable with it. I note that the paradox of the beholder’s position in this work is fundamentally different from the one that Michael Fried describes as significantly modern in relation to Courbet’s large breakthrough works, such as the Burial at Ornans.12 There, the composition virtually impels the beholder into its space, creating a powerful sense of visual incorporation, while the painting includes a figure who mirrors the posture of the external beholder.
With two significant exceptions—the frescoes for the dome of the Basilica del Pilar in Zaragoza done in 1772 and 1780, and a Burial of Christ of 1797—Goya’s religious paintings prior to the San Antonio frescoes did not raise such questions. Many of those works are conceived within a framework of belief that is at once religious and aesthetic; their adherence to artistic convention is consistent with what might be thought of as Goya’s precritical stance. Wonder could be integrated unproblematically into these works in part because they confront the spectator with few questions and make relatively few visual demands. Indeed, the representation of wonder within them seems to relieve the beholder of most intellectual or affective challenges by so easily accommodating the beholder’s gaze. So too the principles of perspective and the conventions of composition support the sacred context that these early religious works presuppose. Among the works in question are the paintings for the Charterhouse of the Aula Dei just outside Zaragoza, the small Burial of Christ (also painted in his Zaragoza years, now in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid), the portraits of the four Doctors of the Church (Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, Saint Gregory, and Saint Jerome) done just before the frescoes in San Antonio, and the work commissioned by the Count of Floridablanca for a side altar in the church of San Francisco el Grande in Madrid showing San Bernardino of Siena preaching before Alfonso of Aragón. These works are sustained by an aesthetic of belief that works through the conventions of religious painting; they rely on the use of narrative forms, on sculptural modeling, and on effects of color, in order to lend a sense of depth and dimension and, especially in the case of the portraits, of “liveness,” to their subjects.
Among Goya’s religious works in Zaragoza were the seven large paintings he did in oil on dry plaster (rather than as frescoes) for the Charterhouse of the Carthusian Monks, the Aula Dei. Granted, the works have been severely compromised because of the deterioration of the surface of the walls; subsequent efforts at restoration amounted to the repainting of large portions of them. But the subject matter and narrative form of the paintings tell much, nonetheless. These are all New Testament stories: the Annunciation to Joachim, the Birth of the Virgin, the Betrothal of the Virgin, the Visitation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple, and the Circumcision. They are all rendered according to neoclassical norms for the treatment of narrative subjects in art. Architectural elements within these paintings provide a secure visual orientation for the spectator, as they also seem to do for the figures within each of the scenes. (It is by contrast remarkable how Goya uses the architectural element of the railing in the San Antonio fresco to circumscribe the scene and to render it precarious.) In one of the Aula Dei works, the Betrothal of the Virgin (Figure 7), the figures gesture in the rhetorical ways that were associated with the style of Jacques Louis David, whose works were known in Spain.
But in Goya’s early religious paintings such gestures have the effect of ignoring the presence of the beholder rather than indicating it, not so much by denying the beholder as by unquestioningly presupposing the stance of a believing spectator.13 In contrast to the dome of San Antonio, the images in the Aula Dei accept as unproblematic the elemental fact that they would be viewed frontally. Moreover, they achieve coherence as a group of narrative scenes, much as Goya’s tapestry cartoons make most sense when understood as an ensemble in the context of the various rooms for which they were planned.14
As critics have noted, the sheer scale of the Aula Dei paintings also meant that there was more space on the walls for Goya to cover than might rightly be occupied by any of the central scenes they treat.15 His recourse was to add background landscapes, folds of drapery, and incidental structures of various types (steps, pedestals, platforms, etc.) in order to make up the difference. In San Antonio, by contrast, Goya transformed the curved picture plane on which the main action was represented into a vast social “canvas” in the round. Above the internal spectators is a landscape and a sky that draw the eye dizzyingly toward an empty nothingness; the landscape anticipates passages in some of the later works in which Goya all but abandons figuration altogether. This is a space that “reads” as if governed from above by a final vacancy, bereft of any forces that might carry the miracle worker or his father heavenward. The work as a whole derives power from the sheer visual drama of the circular composition and from the steep curvature of the dome, which terminates in a hollow central cupola. Indeed, Goya seems in the San Antonio frescoes to have been responding to the power of a vacant space—to its ability to suggest the emptiness of a context that had once been filled with the signs and effects of religious belief.
Figure 7. Francisco Goya, Betrothal of the Virgin. 1774. Oil on plaster, 306 × 790 cm. Aula Dei, Zaragoza.
These features of the San Antonio frescoes are even more remarkable if one considers them in contrast to the relative conventionality of some of Goya’s other religious commissions, such as the two frescoes for the Basilica of the Virgen del Pilar. The Adoration of the Name of God in the small choir (coreto) was completed in 1772; the other, larger work, painted on the main cupola in 1780, is Mary, Queen of Martyrs (Figure 8). It’s worth a detour to consider these images. Janis Tomlinson rightly notes that Goya adopted the perspective of an easel painting for The Adoration of the Name of God.16 For my purpose, this also meant adopting the illusion that the circumstance of the fresco was something other—something at once more painterly and more secular—than a church, and that its material support was not in fact a wall. This was a relatively sober work,17 fundamentally neoclassical in its conception, and firm in the power of belief that supports the figures in it. The image shows a heaven full of angels and saints, buoyed up on layers of clouds, all arranged in strongly receding perspective, ascending on the vertical plane toward an apex. At the point of that apex, and at the highest position in the picture plane, stands the triangular icon of the name of God. Flanking angels sing the praises of the Lord and perfume the heavens with incense. The work for Mary, Queen of Martyrs was a rather different affair. This was a later commission that Goya was awarded after submitting materials first to the building committee of the basilica and then to a committee of the Royal Academy. But the project ran into trouble on both religious and aesthetic fronts. Goya had by this time completed a great number of tapestry paintings for various royal residences. Not surprisingly, he complained of having to work on the cupola under the supervision of his brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu, and alongside Francisco’s brother Ramón. Goya’s later sketches for four pendentives (now lost) were met with reservation when he subsequently presented these to the committee; neither was his work on the cupola found pleasing. No doubt the cupola image, and the plans for the pendentives too, showed too many traces of Goya’s experience as a secular artist; his work making the tapestry cartoons seems to have undermined the decorum that the officials would have expected to see observed in the basilica. Goya’s image for the cupola, as Janis Tomlinson notes, includes groups of “gesticulating figures swathed in colorful drapery,” who seem too alive for the scene. “Even worse (in the Committee’s eyes) is the fact that they almost overpower the immobile Virgin.”18
Figure 8. Francisco Goya, Mary Queen of Martyrs. 1780–81. Oil sketch. Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, Zaragoza.
The Burial of Christ painted for the palace of the Count of Sobradiel (Figure 9) is likewise conventional, with the exception of one surprising passage. The work relies on a well-established arrangement of figures for the composition of this hallowed scene. To be sure, the Virgin in this painting more resembles an eighteenth-century commoner than the saintly mother of Christ; to that extent she may be linked to some of the figures in the San Antonio fresco. But neither she nor any of the others in the painting seems to show any form of grief that might press itself upon the beholder or disturb the internal order of the work. Whatever claim the work might make is defeated by the conventionality of its static form, which has a deadening effect even on the figures within it. And yet among the figures in the image there is an angel on the right, who is pictured in motion, as if levitating. Here, it seems, Goya’s effort to paint the supernatural power of an angel seems already to have begun to draw him to confront questions about the plausibility of the visual effects that the supernatural might require. (In later works, such as the Flying Witches, he was to embrace those supernatural powers with the conviction of a critic who had peered into the very heart of superstition and fathomed its seductive weirdness.)
Before turning back to the San Antonio frescoes in greater detail, it is worth noting some further facts about Goya’s earlier career: that he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1780 and subsequently won a commission for an altarpiece for one of the chapels in San Francisco el Grande in Madrid, completed in 1781–83. The work he submitted for admission to the academy in 1780 was a Crucified Christ that Robert Hughes has described with characteristic hyperbole as Goya’s “worst painting” (he goes on to describe it as a “soapy piece of bondieuserie . . . [conveying] a sort of sickly, moaning piety that, if it were not for the relative liveness of the paint and its impeccable provenance, would make you doubt it was by Goya at all”).19 This is colorful prose, but it misses the fact that Goya was intent on showing to the members of the academy that he could compete on equal footing with the greatest painters of the Spanish Golden Age—with Murillo, Zurbarán, Pacheco, Ribera, and above all with Velásquez, after whom he had made numerous, studiously crafted etchings in 1778.20 Velásquez’s Crucified Christ was in the royal collection, and Ribera’s Crucifixion had recently been brought to Spain from Naples by the Osunas, whom Goya knew. Goya may well have seen it in their collection at the Alameda country palace called El Capricho, realizing that they had reclaimed this work for Spain.
Figure 9. Francisco Goya, Burial of Christ. 1770. Oil on canvas, 130 × 95 cm. Fundacion Lazaro Galdiano, Spain.
Goya’s Crucified Christ is important both because it shows something about his relationship to the art of the past—especially where the past was Spanish, and was recognized as having a special importance for the development of art in official contexts—and because it reveals the role that color and sculptural form play in sustaining the illusion of an image whose subject matter is fully believed.21 Goya’s Crucified Christ adheres to a sculptural ideal that is as much about Ribera or Velásquez as forceful predecessors as it is about a set of aesthetic conventions that had been masterfully adopted by an entire range of Spanish Golden Age artists. The work creates an illusion of sculptural depth that is consistent with an aesthetic desire to transcend the basic flatness that sets one of the physical conditions for painting on canvas.22 What Goya’s Crucified Christ lacks is nothing that Velásquez has, but rather demonstrates the raw intensity and material energy of the paint itself. That was one way in which Goya eventually came to see the flatness of the canvas as an opportunity rather than as a constraint to be overcome; it came to be one of his most powerful ways of dealing with the power of religion in the medium of paint. The energy of his paint is already quite evident in the stunning Prado oil sketch for the Taking of Christ (1798) (Figure 10); the final version, in the Cathedral of Toledo, transposes that raw liveness into a dramatism of light.
The side altarpiece that Goya painted for San Francisco el Grande is altogether different in composition and purpose. The work shows the Spanish ruler of Naples (King Alfonso V of Aragón) in prayer at the feet of the Franciscan friar, later saint, Bernardino of Siena (Figure 11). In this composition, the collaborative hierarchy of church and state takes the form of a pyramidal arrangement of actors; the image is equally a statement about the piety of the Spanish ruler and the holy presence of Saint Bernardino. The crucifix-wielding saint occupies the highest place in the picture, while a ray of divine grace bathes his upper body in symbolic light. (The saint’s posture is one that Goya will later reference, albeit in a much darker register, in the image of Saint Francis Borgia at the deathbed of an impenitent.) The upturned gazes of the assembled spectators are reminiscent of El Greco, though the diversity of the faces suggests the direction that Goya will pursue in the San Antonio frescoes. And yet, as Tomlinson has observed, there is no uniform perspective holding these figures together within the visual space they occupy. This is surprising. Given the fact that the work was done as a chapel altarpiece, it was conceived with a particular, external spectator in mind. It was part of a visual theater that depended for its sense on the gaze of the faithful spectators who would worship before it. It stages a mirror-like “reenactment of what would take place in front of the painting as the officiant stands before his parishioners, mimicking the stances of saint, king, and courtiers.”23
Figure 10. Francisco Goya, Taking of Christ. 1798. Oil on canvas, 40.2 × 23.1 cm. Prado Museum, Madrid.
Figure 11. Francisco Goya, The Sermon of Saint Bernardino of Siena. 1784. 480 cm × 300 cm. Church of San Francisco el Grande, Madrid, Spain.
And yet that otherwise perfect mirroring is upset by Goya’s inclusion of an image of himself on the right hand side of the scene, looking toward the faithful spectator.24 This bit of self-consciousness may well be taken as the signature of a young artist whose career was clearly on the ascent. And while it also references the self-consciousness of artists like Velásquez and Rembrandt, it also suggests Goya’s particular awareness of the ultimate “constructedness” of the work of art. A similar, even more prominent moment of self-incorporation is important in the portrait of the 1783 Count of Floridablanca, in the collection of the Bank of Spain (Figure 12), where Goya depicts himself showing his work to the sitter, who is surrounded by the artifacts associated with his public career. The count was responsible for a number of large-scale public works projects, and so the painting shows the plans for the Aragón canal displayed against the table. But also lying on the floor is what appears to be a copy of volume 2 of Antonio de Palomino’s early eighteenth-century treatise on the history and technique of art, titled Práctica de la pintura. The image makes the point that painting has a place among the most highly esteemed human inventions. In the Enlightened sense, painting and engineering are both arts, and the fact that one is “liberal” hardly means that it is lesser than any of the mechanical arts. Palomino’s treatise, the Museo pictórico y escala óptica, which I mention again below, deals extensively with visual perspective; it recognizes that painting has its basis in optics, and so in mathematics, but that it requires mathematics and invention in equal measures. As Goya himself said in his statement to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the source of art lies in the power of human invention, which may well take its bearings by “nature” rather than by established rules; and yet artifactual creation gives rise to a visual world that can be shown as unmade for the same reason that it is itself made. (This becomes quite apparent in Goya’s aquatints and later paintings.)
The fresco in San Antonio marks a radical departure both from the model that Tiepolo had provided and from Goya’s earlier religious works. It is an earthbound work even though it is about a miracle scene. Moreover, its position overhead and on a concave surface led Goya to confront a series of questions about the conditions under which any image must be constructed so as to be viewed as natural. Given that Goya’s rendition of the miracle scene was earthbound rather than heavenly, it became imperative for him to fathom whether the effect of flatness, characteristic of painting on canvas or on a wall, was in fact necessary, and whether it could be reproduced on a concave surface. The answer to that question involved the technique of anamorphosis, which Goya had practiced during his Italian years. To summarize briefly, an anamorphosis is a deformed image that appears in its true shape only when viewed in some highly “unconventional” way. It is, according to one common understanding, the distorted projection of an image on a plane or curved surface, which, when viewed from a particular angle, or as if reflected in a curved mirror, appears regular and in normal proportion. In one common type of anamorphosis, sometimes termed “oblique,” the unconventionality arises from the fact that the image must be viewed from a position that is very far from the usual frontal angle from which we normally expect pictures to be seen and understood. In another common form, sometimes termed “catoptric,” the image must be seen reflected in a distorting mirror, typically cylindrical or conical in form, in order for it to make sense.
Figure 12. Francisco Goya, Count Floridablanca. 1783. 262 × 166 cm. Banco de Espana, Madrid.
The most influential treatise on painting in Goya’s time, Palomino’s Museo pictórico (the three parts of which had been reprinted in 1795–97), includes a detailed discussion of the alteration of conventional perspective demanded by curved surfaces; there is special treatment of the techniques required for painting on concave ceilings. Palomino describes the anamorphic effects of these situations as a forms of “deformation” (deformación).25 Beyond Goya’s familiarity with Palomino’s treatise, recent scholarship has shown that Goya was interested in the effects of anamorphosis from at least as early as his Italian travels in 1771. The recently discovered Italian sketchbook includes several experiments with anamorphic images. Among these are the preparatory drawings for the painting of Hannibal Crossing the Alps, which Goya eventually entered into a competition at Parma; the sketches in question appear to be nonsense except when viewed from a radically oblique angle, from which they clearly appear as faces.26
In the years preceding the frescoes of San Antonio Goya also painted a Last Supper in Cádiz (1796–97) (Figure 13), which, while not exactly anamorphic, is nonetheless rendered from a perspective that is oblique in the extreme. The compression characteristic of the Aula Dei works such as The Betrothal of the Virgin has been replaced by a heightened depth. The apostles sit on the floor with Christ, reclining in various angled positions; they are seen from a perspective that attempts to approach the impossible flatness of a purely horizontal view receding deeply toward an empty background. It is probably no accident that in Goya’s speech to the Academy of San Fernando he praised Carracci among a very few named artists; quite possibly while in Rome he had seen Carracci’s Dead Christ (Figure 14), as well as Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, both of which press Albertian principles of perspective to the extreme. Goya said that Carracci was particularly important because he gave free rein to his students (that he “revived Painting that since the time of Raphael had fallen into decline, with the liberality of his genius, he gave birth to more disciples, and better than as many practitioners as there has been, leaving each to proceed following the inclination of his spirit”).27 But whereas these images involve forceful and purposive distortions—in the case of the Carracci so as to present the figure of the dead Christ in all the extremity of its suffering—the perspective technique that governs Goya’s San Antonio fresco is, by contrast, the “resolution” of an anamorphic image: the work makes visual sense as a flat image in the round because it has been projected onto the distorting surface that is required to view it clearly. It is an example of a kind of illusionism that asks us to look beyond the concave surface that supports it. The implication for an understanding of the constructedness of any image is profound, and especially so because the thematic content of this particular image is a miracle scene.
Some of the figures in the San Antonio frescoes call forth the idea of a contextual space, typically social; such is the case with the majas and the celestina. But others, such as the “ecstatic figure,” can scarcely be placed at all. Moreover, the various groups of figures seem to share little by way of relationship with one another. They form a circle not because there is any formal or thematic closure in the work but simply because that is the form of the work’s material support. In terms of composition, Goya’s fresco in San Antonio de la Florida is also one of his most important efforts in the genre of ensemble painting. The work is seldom regarded in this way, in part because discussions of the genre of “ensemble painting” tend to concentrate either on Dutch group portraits or on the more modern ensembles that begin with Courbet’s large-scale works, such as the Burial at Ornans and that reach at least until Guernica. Goya’s fresco is distinct with regard to both these traditions. When the San Antonio fresco is viewed, as it must be, from below and in the round, there is no absolute focal center for its ensembles. To see it at all requires that the viewer rotate an upward gaze around all points in an unstructured circle. The symmetry that positions the so-called ecstatic figure directly opposite Saint Anthony introduces one element of visual orientation, but it hardly changes the fact that the image sprawls across the circle, without structural articulations save for the loosely defined groupings mentioned above.
Figure 13. Francisco Goya, Last Supper. 1796–97. Museo Historico Municipal, Cádiz, Spain.
Figure 14. Annibale Carracci, Dead Christ Mourned. 1604. Oil on canvas, 92.8 × 103.2 cm. The National Gallery, London.
Goya’s fresco works consciously with the fact that its orientation is not horizontal in any physical sense. And yet the image reads thematically as if its underlying thematic ground does lie in the horizontality of the social and secular space in which the miracle is set. The horizontal elements of the image, which are all parts of its thematic presuppositions, stand in contradiction with the shape of the dome. In acknowledging the material support of the work, and in constructing the illusion of flatness on the basis of it, Goya began to confront an issue that later modernist painting would find crucial. Modernist painting struggled, in one of its modes at least, to resist the tendency to imagine all objects of sight as located in a semblance of three-dimensional space; rather, modernism sought to accept objects in painting as conditioned by something prior, and potentially antithetical to that—by the flatness of the canvas. Hence Clement Greenberg, writing of what modernism sought to oppose, would remark that “all recognizable entities (including pictures themselves) exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity suffices to call up associations of that kinds of space.”28 Goya’s work in the San Antonio frescoes presages modernism, though in a somewhat different way. In it, he coupled an acknowledgment of the physical conditions of the illusionistic image with a reassessment of unquestioned alliances between religious belief and the aesthetic conventions of composition, form, and color, which had for so long supported one another. This in turn set the stage for the development of a critical project that would address itself equally to the conventions of visual representation and to the world that such images were ostensibly “about.”
NOTES
1. I follow the translation of Goya’s speech as included in the appendix to Janis Tomlinson, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746–1828 (London: Phaidon, 1994), 306. The term “inventadas,” which is not uncommon in printmaking, is meant to suggest that the images that are not copied or otherwise derived from prior ones, but are instead originally conceived. The term was prominent in Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco’s treatise, the Museo pictórico, y escala óptica (1715–27; 2nd ed., 1795–97), where it carries the sense of rhetorical invention, i.e., of finding or uncovering the topic to be treated. (See especially 2:122–26: “Qué cosa sea inventar.”) Already in making some of the tapestry cartoons Goya would assert that they were of his “own invention” (“de invención mía”). See Valentín de Sambricio, Tapices de Goya (Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 1946), doc. 22, where Goya refers to “The Meadow of San Isidro.” For more on the sense and the implications of “invention” in Goya, see Janis Tomlinson, Francisco Goya: The Tapestry Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially chap. 2, “Of My Own Invention,” and the epilogue, “Invention into Metaphor.” Tomlinson links the importance of “invention” in Goya in part to the development of a tradition of national painting in Spain.
2. Valeriano Bozal, Goya y el gusto moderno, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Alianza, 2002), 67. Addison’s The Spectator (1712) was translated into Spanish from the French and was a direct influence on Clavijo y Fajardo’s influential text (for Goya’s world), El Pensador. Bozal goes on to note that Spain had virtually no native tradition of “picturesque” painting. The picturesque painters who held greatest sway in the decades before Goya’s ascendancy were foreigners, such as Miguel Angel Houasse.
3. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
4. The writer/translator was José Francisco Isla, whose Año cristiano drew on a text by Jean Croiset, in the Année Chrétienne. See Enrique Lafuente-Ferrari, Goya and the Frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Skira, 1955), 23. The story is cited in Hans Rothe, Las pinturas del panteón de Goya, trans. Manuel Gutiérrez Marín (Barcelona: Orbis, 1944).
5. Fred Licht, Goya (New York: Abbeville Press, 2001), 77. N.B., This is a substantially revised and expanded edition of Licht’s 1979 book, Goya: The Origin of the Modern Temper in Art.
6. Rothe, Las pinturas del panteón de Goya, 12.
7. Robert Hughes, Goya (New York: Knopf, 2006), 213.
8. Robert Calasso, Tiepolo Pink (New York: Knopf, 2009), 197.
9. Ibid., 198.
10. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 93–94.
11. Manet, on Tiepolo, as recorded by Charles Toché, winter, 1874–75: “They’re so boring, these Italians, with their allegories, their characters from Jerusalem Delivered and Orlando Furioso, with all that showy bric-a-brac.” Manet by Himself, ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau (1991; Edison, N.J.: Chartwell Books, 2001), 172.
12. Michael Fried, “The Structure of Beholding in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans,” Critical Inquiry 9 (June 1983): 635–83.
13. The issue of what it means for a work to refuse or to invite the presence of the beholder is one that Michael Fried has discussed at length over the course of many works beginning with Absorption and Theatricality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Tomlinson notes that, as with the tapestry cartoons, Goya attempts to mitigate the fact that the works were to be placed high on a wall by compressing the figures against the background (Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 22).
14. See Tomlinson, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 25–37.
15. See, for example, ibid., 21–22.
16. Ibid., 18.
17. Tomlinson notes that the “Adoration” refuses baroque ebullience and avoids rococo complexity (Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 18). And yet the work does recall the rococo painting of Giaquinto.
18. Tomlinson, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 54.
19. Hughes, Goya, 99.
20. Goya was at once fascinated by Velásquez’s techniques, as the etchings show, but also determined to displace their unique sense of space in the process of transposing them to the far more resistant medium of etching.
21. The portraits of Saint Ambrose and Saint Gregory bear substantial resemblance to Murillo’s portraits of Saint Isidore and Saint Leander in the Cathedral of Seville.
22. For this sense of the “sculptural,” see Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting.” I cite the version published in Art and Literature 4 (1965): 193–201. This highly influential essay has also met with serious objections. Among the sources of resistance to Greenberg’s focus on flatness is his emphasis on the autonomy of modernist art, that is, its separation from the social and political worlds. Insofar as Goya’s engagement with the physical grounds of art is positioned at the intersection of the sacred and secular worlds, it would be difficult to align it fully with Greenberg’s ideas.
23. Janis Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 11.
24. For a discussion of this work in the context of the others in San Francisco el Grande see Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment, esp. 28–38. The image offers what Tomlinson describes as a warning to anyone who would interpret it as a mimetic recording of the scene (p. 12).
25. Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Museo pictórico, y escala óptica, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Sancha, 1795–97), 2:177–79.
26. See Santiago Alcolea Blanch, “Aníbal, máscaras y anamorfosis en el Cuaderno italiano de Goya” (Barcelona: Instituto Amatller de Arte Hispánico, 1998), 1–18. Goya’s sketch along with Alcolea Blanch’s computer projections are reproduced in this essay.
27. Cited in Tomlinson, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 306.
28. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 196.