Transcript

PROF FRANCISCO CALVO SERALLER
The majority of the Spanish Enlightenment figures - even those who had supported the French during the peninsula war - were supporters of the fight against the French invasion. What I think happened, is that Goya, when the Independence War began, had an ability to separate the horrors of war from the national struggle, and the proof is in The Disasters of War. I don't think that Goya sees the participants any more as French, Spanish or British, he sees them as subject and object of the horror. And that I think is to a certain extent the normal evolution for an acceptable sensibility. I think that in the end, Goya is humanitarian, more than he is political.
JULIET WILSON BAREAU
It's a fearsome scene, guerilla fighters who've been stripped of their clothes, and are being given a rather unchristian burial just by being tossed into a pit, and the title which he writes onto the proof, ‘Caridad ‘ - Charity.
Says it all. And in the background, this figure here, is, I think generally accepted as a self portrait of the artist, with a rather grim expression on his face.
What you bear in mind with an image like this, which is overwhelming really, is that, in effect what he's done is he's gone back to his youth in Italy, he's used his little notebook that he made in Italy, in which he copied classical antique statues. And these are like fragments of classical statues. I mean, you can hardly imagine a more formally extraordinary, perfect conception, as a graphic image. That's the image that came to him when he heard that people were being butchered, and had their body parts strung up on trees.
JANIS TOMLINSON
It's important to say that even if the Enlightenment per se didn't happen, those little rays of hope that might have illuminated Spain - the Enlightenment ideas that might have arrived there - were cut short with Napoleonic invasion. And I'd say not cut short so much because of the the invasion itself, but because of the Spanish reaction to it. They saw the invasion of the French, they saw the French indeed as an evil society, that embodied all those nasty ideas of the Enlightenment, even if they hadn't come to know the ideas of the Enlightenment.
COMMENTARY
Goya's illnesses began in 1792, and may have been lead poisoning. The most significant effect was a loss of hearing which, many have speculated, may have had an effect on his art.
JANIS TOMLINSON
In 1793 a second attack left him deaf for life. And what that might have meant, well we'll never really know. The question one asks is, what happens to how you see when you no longer hear ? Suddenly you become much more aware of expression, of faces, and I think that might have played a major role in Goya's work of the 1790's when you look at the drawings, when you look at the interest in caricature, when you look at the expressions.
COMMENTARY
Curiously, when he became successful, Goya bought a country house outside Madrid, which was already known as ‘The House of the Deaf Man’.
For the principle rooms, he painted the walls in consciously constructed schemes of classical and personal references. These so called Black Paintings, were subsequently chipped from the walls when the house was demolished in the mid nineteenth century, suffering enormously in the process. Hung in the Prado, they have been construed as signifying the artist's increasing pessimism about himself, and perhaps about Spain. But the precise meaning of much of the imagery, remains elusive and certainly doesn’t demonstrate Enlightenment rationality.
When Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne he repressed all earlier attempts to give Spain a liberal Constitution and reinstated the Inquisition. His Rule was not sympathetic to Enlightenment ideas.
Which brings us to the genesis of Goya's most famous image, and its less famous prequel. As with so many of Goya's works, the notion of ‘the national artist documenting a national tragedy’ is only part of the story.
JANIS TOMLINSON
He wrote a letter to the interim government saying I would like your support to document the heroism of the Spanish people against the invaders. That’s the only document we have about those paintings. We don't know anything about them after that. What were they used for ? When were they finished ? When were they painted ? Probably, certainly around 1813 1814. There has been some speculation that they might have decorated a triumphal arch erected for the occasion of Ferdinand VII’s re-entry into Madrid. But you know it's speculation - possibly - we don't know.
LINDA WALSH
In Goya's art, Enlightenment ideals suffer a nightmare fate. The expressive horror of this image emerges from a context of dashed hopes of enlightened reform. The old monarchical regime had been overturned, and the new Napoleonic order had brought war and oppression before its collapse. Goya painted this work just before the tyrant Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne. and it's possible he wanted to prove his patriotism to this potential patron. He rarely expressed political views so openly, particularly in public works.
PROF FRANCISCO CALVO SERALLER
Goya perceived something that was emerging among the Spanish population. He understood how in the contemporary period, that moral victory would be for the vanquished and not for the victors. So when he depicts anonymous people just as they are, with arms forming a cross, and gives the executed man a bright white shirt, every viewer understands that the moral victory is for the one who is going to die, and not that anonymous killing machine, those grey faceless French troops.
LINDA WALSH
The hero of this piece adopts the pose of a crucified Christ, and there are stigmata on his hands. To the left, a priest prays in desperation. These details would have made an impact on Goya's contemporaries, who had by now come to see Napoleon as the Antichrist. And Goya would have known of Ferdinand VII's allegiance to the Catholic church.
JANIS TOMLINSON
How did the people react to these works ? Did they think they were a wonderful sort of heroic production of the patriotism of the Spanish people ? Or alternatively - because I mean if one looks at 2nd of May, one sees, ‘rabble’… I mean lower classes sort of fighting, and they certainly are not heroes in any traditional sense - might that sort of commemoration of the masses have found favour with a royal patron who, like most royalty he always had to fear the masses ?
Or were these paintings you know put up, and then sort of, put away as quickly as possible ? From the last records, one might think they were put away as quickly as possible.
There are other allegories: there's a contemporary of Goya … …Jose Aparicio who did a very neoclassical allegory of the patriotism and the heros of May 2nd, in which, you know you have the neoclassical dying bodies, all centred on the bust of Ferdinand VII. You know, a very dry allegory, but one that was then engraved. So clearly since it was engraved, it was disseminated. Goya's painting - there’s no such record. So my guess would be that, if they were exhibited they were quickly taken down and stored away - where - we don't know at this point.
LINDA WALSH
Goya’s Third of May 1808 sets the tone for the feelings of doubt, 14 disillusion and the terror that were to lie at the heart of Romanticism.