Date: 1778-1818
Technique: Etching, 110 x 85 mm
Showing posts with label Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). Show all posts
7/19/15
Francisco de Goya, The custody is as barbarous as the crime (Tan bárbara la seguridad como el delito) / Little prisoner
Date: 1778-1818
Technique: Etching, 110 x 85 mm
Francisco de Goya, Prison Scene (Prisión Escena)
Date: 1808-12
Technique: Oil on board, 31 x 40 cm
Follower of Francisco de Goya, Searching among the Corpses
Technique: Oil on canvas, 20.3 x 30.8 cm
4/11/13
Francisco de Goya, Fearful Folly from Los Disparates
Technique: Etching and aquatint
12/20/12
Francisco de Goya, The Witches’ Kitchen (La cocina de las brujas)
Date: 1797-98
Technique: Oil on canvas, 45 x 32 cm
According to writer Frank Irving, this work, erroneously known by the title of The Witches' Kitchen (La cocina de las brujas), should in fact be called Berganza and Cañizares (Berganza y Cañizares), since it represents those two characters from one of the Exemplary Stories (Novelas Ejemplares) of Miguel de Cervantes (Alcalá de Henares, 1547-Madrid, 1616): The Deceitful Marriage and The Dogs' Colloquy. Assuming this is true, this painting by Goya would be based on what is one of Spanish literature's most famous episodes of witchcraft, and would represent Cervantes' tale with only minor modifications.
The principal characters in the painting therefore are the dog Berganza and the witch Cañizares, who is explaining to the dog how to summon demons and make magic potions which give the power of flight. In the centre of the composition we can see the witch, with one leg kneeling on the floor and the other, which more closely resembles that of a goat, at a right angle. Her left hand is reaching into the jug in front of her whilst Berganza the dog, standing and with the left leg and right arm of a human being, watches as a billy goat flies off on a broomstick up the kitchen chimney, the place where magical rites were usually performed. The two figures standing on the left-hand side of the composition have been summoned by the witch and transformed into demons. Above them hang bones and skulls, as well as an oil lamp which lights the scene.
The message which both Cervantes and Goya set out to communicate with this scene is that a person's imagination is capable of altering their sense of reality. /Fundación Goya en Aragón/
9/24/12
4/2/12
Francisco de Goya, Les Vieilles or Time and the Old Women
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille
Date: 1810-12
Technique: Oil on canvas, 181 x 125 cm
The mark 'X23' at the bottom of the canvas identifies this as a painting listed in 1812 in the inventory of paintings in Goya's house allocated to his son Javier. It probably hung next to one or other of two versions of Majas on a Balcony that bears the number X24. The painting of Les Jeunes or the Young Ones (A Woman Reading a Letter), long thought to have been a pendant and later sharing the same history, was possibly intended as such, although painted a year or two later.
Exceptional in its way as a life-size Capricho, the scale makes the satirical purport the more forceful. But though the general meaning is clear - the ridiculing of the pretentiousness and vanity of the rich and old and ugly - the exact message 'Que tal?' ('How goes it?') on the back of the mirror is not spelt out. A similar theme, without the figure of Time, which is the subject of Plate 55 of Los Caprichos, has lent itself to interpretation as a reference to the Dowager Duchess of Osuna, and also to Queen María Luisa, renowned for her vanity and her ugliness. In support of such an allusion, though the Queen had long since left Spain when this painting was made, one of these old women wears a diamond arrow similar to that worn by María Luisa in the group portrait of Charles IV and his Family.
Goya's son was no doubt referring to this and other paintings that Goya owned in 1812 when he wrote in one of his biographies of his father that Goya was specially interested in the paintings in his house 'because they were made with all the liberty that ownership affords; a liberty which led him in some cases to use the palette knife instead of the brush...and he particularly enjoyed seeing them every day'.
Source
10/3/11
Francisco de Goya, A Scene from El Hechizado por Fuerza (The Forcibly Bewitched)
The National Gallery, London
Date: 1798
Technique: Oil on canvas, 42.5 x 30.8 cm
The subject is from a comedy by the playwright, Antonio de Zamora. The timorous Don Claudio, the main protagonist, has been led to believe that his life depends upon keeping a lamp alight.
The inscription in the bottom right contains the first part of two words 'lampara descomunal' (monstrous lamp). These are the words Don Claudio cries aloud while replenishing the lamp with oil.
The composition may have been suggested to Goya by a stage presentation. The picture is one of six scenes of witchcraft painted for the Duke of Osuna and paid for in 1798.
Source 1
Source 2
9/17/11
Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos)
Date: 1797-99
Technique: Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin, 21.5 cm x 15 cm
Plate 43 of Los Caprichos
The series Los Caprichos is probably Goya's best known. Comprising eighty plates, Goya privately published the series, which was first advertised for sale in the Spanish newspaper Diario de Madrid in 1799 as being a criticism of "human errors and vices," although the subjects are often obscure and interpretation purposely difficult. Lampooning both political and religious figures, Goya soon found it diplomatic to present the original plates to the king for his Calcografia, in exchange for a pension for his son.
The Sleep of Reason is a self-portrait of the artist, surrounded by demonic-looking animals. It was intended as the frontispiece for the series, but Goya soon thought better of this, probably because the subject related too closely to two plates in Rousseau's 1793 Paris edition of Philosophie at a time when the very name of Rousseau was anathema to religious and political leaders in Spain. Instead, Goya created another, more traditional, self-portrait as the frontispiece and buried The Sleep of Reason well within the series, as plate 43.
In Los Caprichos Goya begins to push the boundaries of the intaglio process to achieve a sense of ambiguous space coupled with a modernist sensibility. This series grew out of Goya's developing sense of isolation, the result of a protracted illness he suffered in 1792/93, leaving him totally deaf. This, along with his difficult position as court painter to King Carlos IV at a time when he was becoming increasingly dedicated to the cause of the Spanish peasants, left him feeling compromised. Relying on a variety of influences, Los Caprichos served as a coded expression of the artist's growing involvement in Madrid's political milieu.
Source 1
Source 2
8/4/11
Francisco de Goya, The Dog (Perro semihundido)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 131 x 79 cm
The scene is quite simple: the head of a dog is sticking out of a ditch, it seems to be looking at something to the right and slightly higher up, but there is nothing there - even though one historian has suggested some birds fluttering around; behind the dog there is an undefined space.
X-ray studies of this work have made it possible to discover that of all the Black Paintings this is the one that suffered most when it was transferred to canvas. Goya may have left this work unfinished - although we cannot be sure in this respect - but his imagery is no less effective, whatever the damage. It has become an emblematic image for modern art, in its darkest and most anguish-ridden aspects. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
Francisco de Goya, Asmodea (Al aquelarre, o Asmodea)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 127 x 263 cm
Of all the Black Paintings, this is the most hermetic. The title corresponds to the inventory made by Goya's friend, Antonio Bruguera, and he must have had his reasons for calling it so. Whatever these reasons were, the work itself gives no hint of them. Asmodeus, in masculine form, is the devil that appears in the Book of Tobit, who is responsible for the death of the husbands of Sarah, none of whom were able to consummate their marriage. The last of her seven husbands, Tobias, followed the counsel of the Archangel Raphael and drove off the demon, who fled into Upper Egypt where the archangel tied him up and immobilized him.
Another literary source for the subject of the painting which has often been considered is El diablo cojuelo (''The Limping Devil'') by Luis Vélez de Guevara, as suggested by A. R. Lesage and D. de Torres Villaroel. In that narrative Asmodeus is a devil that flies, a popular superstition who ''eavesdrops'' on households.
In these and other possible sources, there is only one aspect that might be related to the present painting: travel or flight. But there are many which do not fit into the image: above all, the fact that Bruguera refers to ''Asmodea'', not ''Asmodeus''. On the other hand, Goya has introduced some soldiers firing away in the foreground to the right and what would seem to be an military baggage-train in the middle ground. It is impossible to know whether the soldiers are are firing at the baggage-train or not, and all of this affects any iconological interpretation that adheres closely to classical sources: the world of Goya's time is very much present in the uniforms, the rifles, the horses, the soldiers, etc. This much said, it would also be only right to mention the fact that, on the contrary, the clothing of the figures in the air may correspond to the classical world. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
Francisco de Goya, The Fates (Las Parcas, o Átropos)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 123 x 266 cm
Goya turns to three mythological figures: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, daughters of Night, who grant mortals the powers of Good and Evil and persecute both mortals and gods who commit offenses. In his Theogony Hesiod tells us that these goddesses ''never cease to apply their bitter punishment to whomever commits an offense''.
There are four figures in Goya's painting, the three goddesses and another figure that seems to be a man whose hands are (tied?) behind his back as he is carried along by the Fates. The artist has altered the traditional iconographical attributes of the Fates. Clotho is holding a figure - a doll, an ex-voto of human being? - instead of tow or distaff; Lachesis is not spinning, but rather looks into a lens or a mirror, the symbols of time; Atropos, who in traditional iconography snipped the thread of Life, here carries a pair of scissors. The male figure, unarmed, looks towards the viewer.
If the nature of the subject matter is important for understanding this painting, so are the elements which Goya has introduced into the story. First among these is the disappearance of all trace of the heroic sublime or mythological. The Fates are powerful deities and they are represented as such in visual and literary tradition. But this is not the case in Goya's work: their faces are deformed and brutish, especially that of Clotho, and that even the identity of their gender is hidden. Goya's vision of the divinities of Night has a little to do with the ideal nobility of Neoclassicism as it does with the sentimental terror of many Romantic creations. If anything leaps out in these figures it is the brutal sordidness with which they are conceived. Other European artists of the period were concerned with representing nocturnal deities, but only Goya dared to see them in this way, eliminating everything positive, transcendental, or ideal that our concept of ''divinity'' usually entails.
This is not the only thing that seizes the viewer's attention. No less interesting is the nocturnal landscape in which the action takes place: its moonlit beauty, with its silvers and golds, the luminosity of the firmament and the reflections off the trees and bushes, and the angular disposition of the picture space are all fundamental elements of Goya's painting. The overall effect is that of a dream, and it finds consistency in the evidence of oneiric phenomena. The contrast between the figures and silent Nature, the caracter of the Fates, the dummy-like profile of the man being carried along through the air, all contribute to achieving expressive effect. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
6/22/11
Francisco de Goya, The Holy Office or Pilgrimage to the Fountain of Saint Isidore (Peregrinación a la Fuente de San Isidro o El Santo Oficio)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 127 x 266 cm
Goya represents a procession which seems to be led by a member of the Holy Office who is the figure in the right foreground wearing clothing of seventeenth-century fashion, with a rather comical face and gesture. The figures that surround him are elderly pious women who are in no way the envy of the sorceresses of the Witches' Sabbath or the ones who appear in the artist's drawings and prints. The same may be said of those coming in from the right, some of whom, deformed or hunchbacked, stagger along with great difficulty. The pilgrimage is headed for the spring which may bring them a cure, but the characters in the foreground indicate that Goya is rather skeptical in this regard.
This is perhaps the only one of the Black Paintings that has a clearly satirical meaning. The member of the Holy Office does not frighten us, neither do the pious old women who surround him or follow him in procession. It is not surprising that they prompt a grin. Goya's attitude, his approach to the subject, is possibly due to a known fact: at the time this work was painted, the court of the Inquisition had been abolished. It would never be reestablished, not even with the return to absolutism and in spite of the pressure brought to bear by Ferdinand VII.
The Inquisition had assumed religious functions, but it had also become a political instrument, as the Church hierarchy themselves had often recognized. Its presence had done much to shape Spain's cultural life. Goya himself had been investigated by the court on several occasions. First, for his series of prints called Los Caprichos, and later, after the Peninsular War, when hos autorship of the paintings called Las Majas, the property of the first minister, Manuel Godoy, came under scrutinity because they were considered to be obscene. The disappearance of this institution was most surely a relief for the elderly painter, as this work seems to tell us. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
5/30/11
Francisco de Goya, The Cudgel Fight (Duelo a garrotazos)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 125 x 261 cm
This is one of the best known and most widely published of all the Black Paintings. It represents a brutal fight to the death in which the two duellists are buried up to the knee as they bash away at each other, without any hope of escaping. There is no room for doubt as to what is going on in this scene, but no one would interpret it anecdotally. It is perceived as a kind of allegorical reflection on the violence of Spanish life in Goya's time, which was riddled with confrontations, and even the age-old congenital violence of Spanish life which is characterized by our strong urge to fratricide.
The viewer may interpret this scene in its broader sense or in a more limited one, but whichever approach he chooses, he surely can never forget the tragic drama of the image, the inexorability of the duellists' fate, or the extreme violence expressed with such simplicity. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
Francisco de Goya, The Reading (La lectura, o Los políticos)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 126 x 66 cm
During the three years of liberal government (El Trienio Liberal, 1820-1823) the edition of newspapers, pamphlets, and all types of publications, especially of a satirical and political nature, reached a peak thanks to freedom of the Press. People read alone or in groups, such as the one Goya has depicted here: a group of men have gathered to listen to one of them read some sort of broadsheet. From the painting alone we cannot tell what sort of publication is being read, anymore than we can make out exactly where the reading is taking place - such readings tended to take place in cafés, in the street, or in private houses. Once more, Goya has left us in the dark with regard to this part of his subject matter. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
4/19/11
Francisco de Goya, Two Women and a Man (Dos mujeres y un hombre)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 125 x 66 cm
The posture and gestures of the man and both women have always given rise to much comment as well as diverse and unsatisfactory interpretations. Nowdays it is generally held that the subject is masturbation: the man is masturbating and the two women looking on are laughing at him (or with him). However, the painting makes no moralizing comment at all.
It is possible that the three figures are in some kond of interior space, but it might also be out-of-doors, maybe even in the street. Goya is imprecise in this respect. The light is concentrated on the man's arm and elbow, his white shirt and part of the lap of the woman immediately behind him. Shadow engulfs the scene as we move away from the lighted focal point. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
3/1/11
Francisco de Goya, The Saint Isidore Pilgrimage (La Romería de San Isidro)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 138,5 cm x 436 cm
This painting easily brings to mind the ones Goya made in the eighteenth century of public holidays and fêtes, especially the cartoon which was never made into a tapestry called The Meadow of the Hermitage of Saint Isidore. The atmosphere of playfulness, the luminosity and interplay of tones, the animation of the figures, the precise location of place where the activity transpired..., all this has given way to a world that is completely different. Shadows are the dominion of this procession of pilgrims advancing in our direction. Their songs, if there are any, have more of a tragic and desperate air than they do of happiness. The beauty of the woman, partly hidden by mantillas, is lost in the sordid group. The setting has lost any attraction it might once have had, yet it is suggested by the landscape that frames the background, even in some of the figures who have joined the procession.
The scene has been interpreted by many historians as a saturnalia, a feast in honour of Saturn who, like Saint Isidore, is patron of farm workers. This may well be the subject of pilgrimage, but here the excess and revelry characteristic of a saturnalia are nowhere to be found. The scene painted by Goya does not take us back into the past, as befits a nostalgic return to classical mythology; on the contrary, it all seems very immediate. The characters, their dress, and even their appearance, belong to Goya's own times, and are even less defined than that. Here the artist is not trying to make an historical reconstruction, just as he never does in any of the Black Paintings. If he uses the subjects of classical iconography, it is to speak of the present, of the world which was taking shape at the threshold of the nineteenth century.
The group of figures advancing towards us makes up a frieze of many different types. Some are beggars; others, craftsmen or labourers; there are society ladies and people of the middle classes; people from all walks of life, and all of them are participating in the pilgrimage. We are part of the procession, too. Not only is the crowd coming towards us, some of the figures in the foreground establish eye contact with us, thus setting up a dialogue that we cannot avoid. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
2/7/11
Francisco de Goya, Witches' Sabbath - The Great He-Goat (El aquelarre, o El Gran Cabrón)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Date: 1820 - 1823
Technique: Mixed technique on wall, 140,5 x 435,7 cm
All of the witches are facing a demon in the form of a male goat that presides over the ceremony, ''aided'' by a ''secretary'', to his right. At the other end there is a young woman, almost a girl, seated on a chair, waiting for the initiation to begin.
The group of witches that are the focus of the scene are not moving about, but neither are they motionless. Goya's brushwork, each stroke, and the overall composition give the group considerable dynamism, as if they were worked up by some sort of ectasy. The faces are deformed, figures are bent, and some of them seem frightened.
In this work Goya returns to themes that had interested him in the final years of the eighteenth century, in his drawings, prints, and paintings. In this series the artist eliminates all sense of comedy, even the critical approach he had used in earlier years. He does not criticize witchcraft, neither does he ridicule it; he limits himself to presenting the world of darkness. (Valeriano Bozal, Goya-Black Paintings)
Source
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