The black paintings of Francisco de Goya
Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!
Coming to deep and murky waters in this week's post (after a well deserved break as well since it's summer everybody!), I'd like to discuss with you about Francisco de Goya. You might be quite familiar with a lot of his paintings especially with his work regarding the spanish royal family and the many portraits he was commisioned to create or his political paintings that he was later known for. However, not as many people are familiar with a darker era in de Goya's life, his paintings that were created in his last years and were deamed with the name "Black Paintings".
But first, a few words about Francisco de Goya. Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born in Fuendetodos, Zaragosa, in 1746 and died in Bordeaux, France in 1828. He was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker and is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th century. He studied painting from the age of 14 under Jose Luzan y Martinez and moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs. He became a court painter to the Spanish Crown in 1786 and this early portion of his career is marked by portraits of the Spanish aristocracy and royalty, and Rococo style. Goya witnessed one of the most turbulent periods in the Spanish history.
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In general, althought Goya's letters and writings survive, little is really known about his thoughts. After the Napoleonic Wars and the internal turmoil of the changing Spanish government, Goya developed a bittered attitude toward mankind. He had survived two near-fatal illnesses, and grew increasingly anxious and impatient in fear of relapse. He had an acute, first-hand awareness of panic, terror, fear and hysteria. In the end, he had developed a severe and indiagnosed illness in 1793 that left him deaf, after which his work became progressively darker and more pessimistic.
His late period culminates with the Black Paintings of 1819-1823, created on oil on the plaster walls of his house the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man) where disillusioned by political and social developments in Spain, he lived in near isolation. The Black Paintings (Spanish: Pinturas Negras) is the name given to a group of 14 paintings in total that Goya painted in the later years of his life. They portray intense, haunting themes, reflective of both his fear of insanity and his empty outlook on humanity. The paintings were not commissioned and were not meant to leave his home. It is likely that the artist never intended the works for public exhibition.
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Goya did not give titles to the paintings or if he did, he never revealed them. Most names used for them are designations employed by art historians. Initially they were catalogued in 1828 by Goya's friend Antonio Brugada. The series is made up of 14 paintings: Atropos (The Fates), Two Old Men, Two Old Ones Eating Soup, Fight with Cudgels, Witches'Sabbath, Men Reading, Judith and Holofernes, A Pilgrimage to San Isidro, Man Mocked by Two Women, Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro, The Dog, Saturn Devouring His Son, La Leocadia and Asmodea.
The various schools of thought around the Black Paintings include no end of psychiatric and pathological readings, many focused on the unknown, life-threatening illness that Goya suffered shortly before creating them. As with most of his etchings and engravings, Goya used grotesques to illustrate his themes: witches, demons and goblins are all metaphors for violence, ignorance and blind superstition. "The sleep of reason produces monsters" he wrote beneath one of his most emblematic images. Many believe the Black Paintings to be mockeries in the same spirit - cartoons he drew around himself as if the walls were "big sheets of paper".
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The Black Paintings through dark tones with a deliberate distortion of the figures, bring out Goya's expressionism. He painted old age, madness, death, he satirizes religion, denounces civil strife, and painted the State devouring its subjects. He painted duelists, assumptions friars, nuns, the Inquisition, all of this represented by an old world, prior to the French Revolution's ideals.
Black Paintings are nocturnal: they show no light, day dies, and black predominates as background, directly relating to the death of the light. All of this generates a feeling of pessimism, tremendous vision, enigma, and unreal space. The chromatic range is reduced to ocher, gold, earth, gray and black. White is only used in the clothing to give contrast. Blue is used in the skies, and green is barely used. Goya painted with intense emotionality; actually what matters the most to him are not the bodies but the characters' expressions. Their factions represent reflective or ecstatic attitudes. To this second state, the figures respond with eyes wide open, the pupils surrounded with white paint, and open jaws as in caricaturated faces of grotesque animals. Ugly is shown, the terrible beauty is no longer the object of art, but the pathos and a certain conscience to show all aspects of human life without discarding the most disagreeable.
The paintings were originally painted as murals on the walls of the house but later they were "hacked off" the walls and attached to canvas by owner Baron Frederic Emile d'Erlanger. They are now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
Francisco de Goya was once a highly esteemed painter in Spanish society, but his declining health gradually took its toll. However, his descent into what some might call "madness" did not happen without cause. The corruption of the political life he witnessed, the Spanish Inquisition, the psychological turmoil brought on by his illness, old age and likely other personal struggles all contributed to a growing sense of despair. This inner chaos in Goya's mind, eventually manifested in his crwation of the haunting Black Paintings. As we should all be aware, it is often the troubled mind that first senses when the world is shifting.
Thank you for reading, and I'll be seeing you in a next post!
xoxoxo
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