Francisco Goya: The Sleep of Reason
Sometime after 1819, in a farmhouse outside Madrid, a deaf man in his mid-seventies began painting directly onto his own plaster walls. He produced fourteen pictures of witches, a drowning dog, two men clubbing each other in a bog, and Saturn tearing the head off his son. He never exhibited them, never wrote about them, and as far as anyone can establish never discussed them with another human being. The house was called the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man, after a previous owner who had also been deaf. The paintings had no title until long after Goya was dead, when someone called them the Black Paintings, and they have functioned ever since as the point where European art stopped being polite.
A Gilder's Son from Fuendetodos
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born on 30 March 1746 in Fuendetodos, Aragon, into the lower middle class. His father, José Benito de Goya y Franque, was a gilder who worked on religious and decorative commissions, including ornamentation at the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza. At fourteen Francisco entered the studio of the painter José Luzán, where he spent about four years copying prints before striking out alone.
Twice Rejected
He went to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs, the painter favoured by the Spanish crown, clashed with him, and did badly in examinations. He applied to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1763 and again in 1766 and was refused both times. So he paid his own way to Rome around 1770, in the manner of every ambitious European painter of the century. Little is documented about the trip beyond two mythological canvases, *Sacrifice to Vesta* and *Sacrifice to Pan*, dated 1771, and a second prize in a painting competition at Parma.
Back in Zaragoza in 1771 he befriended the Aragonese painter Francisco Bayeu y Subías and on 25 July 1773 married Bayeu's sister Josefa, whom he called Pepa. She bore him seven children. One, Javier, survived to adulthood. She died in 1812.
Tapestries and the Climb to Court
The Bayeu connection got him work designing cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory — roughly forty-two rococo patterns over five years, meant to be woven and hung on the cold stone of El Escorial and the Pardo palace. It was neither prestigious nor lucrative, but it put him in front of the right people and taught him etching, the medium that would eventually reveal both the depths of his imagination and his politics.
The climb was steady. A portrait of the Count of Floridablanca in 1783; a salaried appointment as painter to Charles III in 1786; court painter under Charles IV in 1789; and in 1799 Primer Pintor de Cámara, the highest rank a Spanish court painter could hold, at fifty thousand reales with an allowance for a coach. By any measure he had won.
The Illness
Between late 1792 and early 1793 something went badly wrong. An undiagnosed illness left him permanently deaf. A contemporary reported that "the noises in his head and deafness aren't improving, yet his vision is much better." Medical historians have proposed viral encephalitis, Ménière's disease, and lead poisoning from the lead white he ground himself — a painter poisoned by his own materials being the most novelistic of the theories and not the least plausible. Whatever the cause, it partitioned his life. Cut off from conversation, he turned inward and dark, and the work changed permanently.
Los Caprichos
Convalescing, he made small paintings on tin exploring what he could not say aloud. In 1799 he published *Los Caprichos*, eighty aquatint etchings depicting, in his own framing, the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society. Plate 43 carries the sentence that outlived everything else he wrote: *El sueño de la razón produce monstruos* — the sleep of reason produces monsters. It is deliberately ambiguous in Spanish, since *sueño* means both sleep and dream, and Goya declined to resolve it.
Around the same time he painted, for the royal favourite Manuel de Godoy, *La maja desnuda*, described as the first entirely profane life-size female nude in Western art — no goddess, no myth, no excuse. The sitter has never been identified; the Duchess of Alba and Godoy's mistress Pepita Tudó are the standing candidates and neither is confirmed. The picture was never publicly shown in his lifetime. The Inquisition seized it as obscene in 1813 and kept it until 1836.
War
Napoleon invaded in 1807 and installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. On 2 May 1808 the citizens of Madrid rose; on 3 May the French shot hundreds of them. Goya stayed in the city and kept his politics publicly neutral, which was prudent and, later, awkward.
In 1814–15, six years after the fact, he painted *The Second of May 1808* and *The Third of May 1808*. The second of these did something new. As Smarthistory describes it, a single lantern provides the only light in the picture, throwing a spiritual glare onto a poor labourer who kneels with his arms flung wide in the posture of the crucifixion — and close inspection of his right hand shows stigmata. His face registers anguish more sad than terrified. The firing squad opposite has no faces at all; the soldiers merge into a single mechanical, insect-like, many-legged creature incapable of feeling anything. Bodies lie in pools of blood, and the men still waiting cover their eyes. Every convention of eighteenth-century battle painting is inverted: no glory, no named hero, no beautiful narrative, just an anti-hero shot at the side of a road like an animal in a place that could be anywhere.
He also produced eighty etchings, *The Disasters of War*, which were too dangerous to publish and did not appear until 1863, thirty-five years after his death. The first forty-seven plates cover combat and its civilian victims; plates 48 to 64 record the Madrid famine of 1811–12; the last seventeen register liberal despair at the restored monarchy's rejection of the 1812 constitution. One historian called the sequence a prodigious flowering of rage.
The House of the Deaf Man
When Ferdinand VII was restored in 1814, Goya denied having collaborated, though he had painted for French patrons during the occupation. He kept some official work but never painted the king. Alienated and old, he withdrew to the Quinta del Sordo with Leocadia Weiss, a housekeeper thirty-five years his junior who was probably his lover, and covered the walls in oil.
Around 1874 Baron Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger had the Black Paintings transferred from plaster to canvas, a process that damaged them extensively. They now hang in the Prado. Goya himself left Spain in 1824, aged seventy-eight, for Bordeaux, where he made the *Tauromaquia* bullfighting series. A stroke paralysed his right side and he died there on 16 April 1828, aged eighty-two.
Why Francisco Is Called a Genius
Goya is, in the standard formulation, "the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns" — a phrase that gets used so often it has stopped being examined. What it actually points at is a capacity almost no other painter has demonstrated: the ability to invent, from nothing, a visual grammar for events that had never been depicted honestly.
Before *The Third of May*, European painting had no way of showing an atrocity as an atrocity. The available languages were heroic (the noble death), allegorical (Justice weeping), or religious (martyrdom transfigured). Goya took the third and detonated it: he gave his peasant the pose and the stigmata of Christ, then denied him every consolation the reference normally supplies. He made the killers faceless not for effect but because facelessness is the accurate description of an execution squad. And he understood that the horror of mass violence lies in its administrative repetition — the queue of men waiting their turn, receding into the dark. The rest of his career shows the same faculty applied elsewhere: in the *Caprichos*, a form for satire that operates through dream logic; in the Black Paintings, a form for private dread that has no precedent whatsoever and no obvious ancestor. Picasso and Dalí both worked directly from him, and *Guernica* is unimaginable without the *Disasters*.
The counter-case is worth stating, because Goya's admirers rarely do. He was a career courtier who spent thirty years painting flattering pictures of a royal family he privately found ridiculous, took a salary from Charles IV, worked for French patrons under the occupation, and then denied it when the Bourbons came back. His radicalism was almost entirely private and almost entirely posthumous — the *Disasters* were unpublished for thirty-five years, the *maja* was hidden, the Black Paintings were on his own walls where nobody would see them. A less generous reading is that he had the imagination of a revolutionary and the survival instinct of a functionary, and that we admire the work he had the sense not to show anyone. Nor is the object of our admiration entirely his: the Black Paintings we look at today were ripped off plaster onto canvas fifty years after he died and badly damaged in the process, so their exact surfaces are partly the work of nineteenth-century restorers. What we call Goya's darkest achievement is, in the most literal sense, a reconstruction.
Legacy
He was reinterred in Madrid at the Real Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida in 1919, and when officials discovered the skull was missing they received the reply that has served as his epitaph ever since: "Send Goya, with or without head." The remark is exactly the sort of black joke he would have etched. His influence runs through Manet, whose *Execution of Emperor Maximilian* is *The Third of May* rearranged, through Picasso's *Massacre in Korea*, and through every subsequent attempt to make a picture of political violence that does not lie about it.
Achievements
- Notable work: La maja desnuda
- Notable work: San Bernardino of Siena preaching before Alfonso V of Aragon
- Notable work: The Third of May 1808
- Notable work: The Clothed Maja
- Movement: Romanticism and Rococo
