Dark Goya (Full length): The later Works

this video contains images which

some viewers may find distressing

in 1819 Francisco Jose

De Goya illusientes commonly

known as Goya was a successful and celebrated artist

then suddenly he withdrew

from public life left

Madrid and the Royal Court behind

and moved into a farmhouse in the

his wife and most of his friends were dead and

he had become isolated

73 years old sick

and completely deaf his long life was coming to a close but

he wasn't finished yet

the man who once painted crucifixions

Miracles Saints and Priests

now painted terrifying demonic

raw and brutal works

works without even a hint of God

black paintings were created during his later years in Spain from around 1819

to 1823 and convey his deeply pessimistic

view of humanity he went from being the most famous painter

in the country idolized

by an adoring public to

an artist who created his Works in total isolation

on the bare walls of his secluded Farmhouse which

were never intended for public viewing

he never named them or explained

them and only after his death would they be named the pinturas

negras the black paintings

because of the dark colors he used the

deep dark pessimism and

their diabolical subjects matter

to understand his black paintings

we need to First understand how Goya

went from Royal portraits

to the horrors of War to

arrive at this end point

Goya was a man from a humble background Who

Rose through the ranks to reach the upper echelons of high society

in 1775 he arrived in Madrid from Zaragoza

at first he worked on tapestry

cartoons for the Royal residences

creating painting designs to be woven into tapestries

for Royal palaces which gave him his first contact with the Spanish royal family

it was in the tapestry

Factory that he learned to tell a story

in 1789 the year of the French Revolution

he would be appointed court painter

and eventually worked for three Spanish Kings

first Charles III the great reformer

then his son the

inept Charles IV and then his son the

Tyrant Ferdinand in between he

would work for the occupying

French King Joseph Bonaparte

in his 40s Goya

was financially and socially secure

respected and newly Bourgeois

but just as he was getting too comfortable his

health took a Sinister turn while

at the same time Spain

went through some of the most enormous

political and social upheavals

in its history and

Goya was in the thick of it

he had started life at the Royal Court as a naturalistic

painter of the upper

but slowly he underwent an unexpected

revolution of his own from

the light to the dark

in 1792 when Goya

was 46 he developed a mysterious

illness he survived but went completely

deaf this profoundly impacted

his art as he began to explore a more personal Vision

which became increasingly Visionary

and he started to produce his most subversive

work he created Los capricos

in his 50s the

disasters of War were

produced in his 60s and

then the black paintings

he made in his 70s

his later work was mostly produced in secret while

he was still an employee of the Court

Goya would be a pragmatist

in public but a revolutionary

in private in 1808

Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain

ousted the recently crowned Ferdinand

VII and crowned his own brother Joseph

Bonaparte king of Spain

Goya remained in Madrid during the occupation by the French and

even worked for them

this would have serious implications

for him later when

the French were expelled

and the Spanish monarchy

was restored for many Spanish liberals

like Goya the French invasion

was complicated like many dictators

then and now Napoleon

came in with talks

of restoring democracy Ferdinand

was a despised dictator and

Goya and his liberal friends had

initially supported the aims of the French Revolution

they saw French rule as the great hope of liberalization

and enlightenment and in fact one of the first things Napoleon

did was to abolish the hated Inquisition

but the truth is that under occupation

goya's opinion of the French changed

after personally witnessing the violent subjugation

of his countrymen by the occupying

troops the war and its ensuing atrocities

affected him and his work deeply and

we start to see a darker subject matter

emotional work which shows deep fear for Spain's future

after a brutal suppression

Spanish Rebels started a campaign of Guerrilla warfare there

would be repercussions but

eventually Napoleon would be forced out in 1813

and King Ferdinand VII

who had been living in Exile was reinstated

Goya had started his Royal career with ferdinand's

grandfather the Beloved Charles III

a king who believed in religious reform and

a constitutional monarchy the

painter and the King had much in common following

many of the principles of the Enlightenment

an intellectual and philosophical

movement that had spread throughout the world the

place reason over Superstition

and science over religion

all over the world great

thinkers were talking of a wall of separation between church and state but

Ferdinand VII declared himself absolute

monarch he rejected any type of modernization

reinstated the Inquisition and

gave the church more power revoked

the Constitution clamped down on descent with an Iron Fist and began the process

of dragging Spain back into the Dark

produced his series on the monstrosities

of war and human behavior

called Los disastras de la Guerra or the disasters of War he

wrote on one of them no

se puede mirar one

cannot look at this

to this day some

of his work is hard to look at

in some strange way his deafness and the isolation that came with it gave

him freedom to work in a more experimental

vein rather than something a patron had demanded

his darker work however would either be censored

or not even see the light of day Francisco

Goya was a truth teller but not everybody wanted

to hear the truth

was painted just before Goya

was struck and this was painted after

from 1792 on goya's

private world would be stripped of color and Light

the artist said he saw scenes like yard with lunatics

in the Asylum of Zaragoza

it shows a scene of violence occurring in an open courtyard

of an insane asylum

but despite the yard being open to the skies the

inmates are shrouded in

the dark subject matter and the use of Shadow to represent ignorance

would prefigure his later

etchings this series of aquitin

prints Los capricos and the disasters of War has

long been recognized as one of the Supreme monuments

of European Arts intalio

is the name for any technique in which the image is cut into the

surface and the cut line or sunken area holds

achieving aquatin tones is

a very complex printing

process but here is a rough idea

for the initial design a

copper plate is heated then

it is covered with a waxy acid-resistant

ground then a design is drawn onto the wax ground with

an etching needle and so exposing

the surface of the plate

because the drawings are etched into soft waxy ground rather

than directly to metal for example as

here in the case of

the etched line is typically clean and can be delicate intricate

and spontaneous like drawing or

watercolor the etching is done back to front including

all the writing if

there is any as

the final print will be the Reversed image

once the design is

etched the plate is immersed in a bath of acid

where there is still wax on the plate the

acid doesn't bite however

the lines that were etched and so exposed by the artist get

attacked by the acid

leaving their design embedded

in the surface in

grooves which will hold ink

gradations of line tone can be achieved by varying the length of time in

the Acid Bath longer

periods produce more deeply bitten areas which print as darker lines

the plate is then covered with ink which is pushed into those grooves

then most of it is lifted off leaving

the grooves holding ink

the paper is soaked in water then laid on top of the Inked Up

plate and then it is run through the Press

this initial engraving is the first stage before adding

aquatin tones aquatant is used to create tonal

effects rather than lines here

we can see three stages of an aquatin

print at first the

etched design is printed

then one tone is added and

then another is added

to make these tonal areas the

same plate is dusted with an acid resistant material

called powdered rosin which

is attached by Heating

the plate is then immersed in an acid bath just

like when etching and the acid eats into the metal around

the dust particles to

produce a grainy sandpaper-like

surface which holds enough ink to give the effect of

an area of wash when

Inked or printed on

the 6th of February 1799

the popular newspaper Diario

de Madrid carried an ad from Francisco Goya

announcing the publication and sale of a series of new etchings he

stressed in the public announcement

that in none of the compositions

that formed this collection as

the author proposed to ridicule

the particular faults of one or another individual

in other words the

work came with a disclaimer

Goya published a series of 80

etchings and aquatins called

Los capricos or the Caprices in which he took the opportunity

to show their hypocrisies

and Follies of an unenlightened

population while critiquing the vanity and ignorance of contemporary

Society the technique of aquitint

allowed artists to create a watercolor

look and Goya became a master at using a broad range of contrasting

aquatants to reveal the shadowy world of ignorance

Goya may have started them as early as 1795

when even pre-napolian the political situation

in Spain had changed

the reign of Charles IV was dominated by crisis

after crisis Wars with revolutionary

France and then England weakened

Spain's economy the government attacked

the press and censored political views

but interestingly social satire

like Los Caprices flourished

Goya had not long been struck deaf and in recovery he developed a personal

interest in the enlightenment

these ideas were almost certainly

an inspiration for his most famous plate from Los capricos

number 43 the sleep of Reason produces

monsters Rousseau was the man whose words inspired

the French revolutionaries and

was now inspiring a Spanish court painter

Words which were censored by both the Spanish church and the crown

the frontish piece of Russo's

1793 edition of philosophy

Bears a striking resemblance to goya's

etching and it is quite possible that

it was this book The

sowed the Seas for goya's

own personal the distraught man slumped

over the desk is

Goya himself we know this from an earlier Preparatory

sketch Goya shows the struggle between reason and Imagination

his audience would have recognized the menacing bats and owls as symbols of ignorance

and Evil at the lower right a lynx watches vigilantly

alerting us to the rise of monstrous forces that appear when sleep descends

by the man's hands are the tools of his trade paper

and brushes an owl is handing over a brush as if to encourage him

to continue his work

we know that Goya originally intended this as the title page to the series

rather than the self-portrait

he went despite its relegation to Plate 43

it has come to symbolize the overall meaning of the series that

is what happens when reason or rationality

is and superstitious beliefs take over from science and reason

and we produce monsters

or monstrous in Los capricos

no member of Spanish Society

was spared his acid pen

superstitious peasants and prostitutes

belief in witches the

ignorance of the ruling classes

and most shockingly of all the

Catholic Church were all Targets

Goya satire of religion was particularly dangerous

here we see a drunken priest pulling up his trousers after consummating

an unspecified sexual act

this plate has a group of clergymen

getting drunk besides an enormous barrel of beer and Goya has them saying

no one has seen us

we need to remind ourselves of the religious oppression

in Spain where the Inquisition remained

a force until 1834.

the church had complete control and

decided what could be read and what couldn't what

could be taught and what couldn't and

what art was and

wasn't and if you went against these teachings you could be persecuted

by the inevitably Goya

was reported to the authorities and

only two days after publication

he withdrew the Caprices

from public sale luckily

for us in 1803

Goya gifted the original copper

plates to the king who

gave them to the San Fernando

Academy of Fine Arts where

they remained today in

France the political revolution inspired

by the enlightenment devolved

into violence leading to Napoleon becoming emperor

of France which would have direct consequences

for Spain after the Napoleonic

Invasion spontaneous rioting broke out and

on May the 2nd 1808

Spanish citizens rose up against the French occupiers

the next day the

French struck back at dawn and

hundreds of Spanish citizens

were rounded up and shot

goya's painting of one of those executions

will stand in for all the brutalities of War

we can debate the ethics or otherwise of Goya

working for the occupying

Napoleonic court but we must remember he

was the court painter

and needed to being

in Madrid meant he could bear witness to the horrors of the war perpetrated

by Napoleon's armies and

so he started working in secret and

a great personal risk

on new etchings which would be called the disasters of War

some of the ideas from

the etchings would inform his third of May canvas

when Napoleon was driven out and Ferdinand

VII was on his way back in Goya

approached the provisional government with

a request to paint two enormous history paintings

one depicting the Spanish Rebellion

against the French and

another set the following day showing

the execution of those Spanish Heroes

by Napoleonic troops this

was six years after the actual event took place and

at a time when goya's

loyalty to the Spanish Crown was being questioned

the paintings were done extremely

quickly within a couple of months

Goya had a lot to prove

3rd of May 1808

is set in the early morning after the uprising

the painting features two groups of men in

the shadows is the anonymous firing

squad of the French army

melded together as a single unit an

instrument of War we

cannot see their faces

emphasizing the anonymity of oppressors

the contrast between the passion of the pleading victims and

the cold mechanical firing squad is

what makes this work so

the central christ-like figure is an anti-hero

who is about to be executed

on the side of the road like a dog as

bodies of slaughtered citizens pile

up beneath him Goya

uses him as a symbol of martyrdom

of man's inhumanity to man and

the whiteness of his shirt is there to represent the innocence of all victims

the scene is lit by a lantern on the ground which

if you look carefully is actually only throwing

light on the main

as well as the crucifixion

pose his hands show the wounds of the Stigmata

which Picasso will reference for Guernica

his anti-war painting along

with the pose of the central figure

lights candles and lanterns

are often tied into images of martyrdom

in Christian art as

a metaphor for the presence of God

but in goya's painting the light is there to make an easy shot for

the firing squad and

to force us to witness the atrocity

goyas a verse the whole concept of light and

takes God out of the equation

the artist broke the rules of art by

creating a war painting that has no Heroes

one that shows a powerful State exacting

revenge against ordinary going

back in history War

paintings have always been about opposing

armies about Victory but

this is a complete break from the heroic symbols of war the

figures including a friar are

not heroic but cower in fear as a mass of blood seeps

into the sand once

more Goya shows us the truth but

as I said not

everyone wants to hear the

in 1813 Fernando was on his way back in

unbeknownst to Spain it was just about to go from the frying pan Into

the Fire and when Ferdinand

VII returned to Madrid in 1814

six years after he left he

did not approve of the two paintings created in his absence and

so they were put in

and there they would remain hidden

from view for over 40 years

the last thing the newly restored King wanted was

to remind ordinary citizens

that they also have the power to overthrow their oppressors

this painting is the one against which all future paintings

of violent conflict will be measured a

powerful statement on tragedy

and abuse of power in the name of Liberation

a statement that is as important today as

it was 200 years ago

thank you between 1810

when Goya was part of the French occupied

Spanish Court in 1819

before he went into Exile

Goya was working on the disasters of War a

series of 82 aquatin

etchings which take up after May the 3rd 1808

except with that painting it was perfectly clear who were the bad guys and

who were the good

but these etchings were

much more ambiguous and

much more confrontational they

are as hard if not harder to look at than his black paintings

he rejects the bombastic heroics

of previous war art and shows the effects on individuals

on top of this he

once again dispenses with color and

uses Shadow and shade to show its

universal truth these are not propaganda

they are the artist takes the concepts of patriotism

heroism and Triumph and turns them on their head

he had personally lived through this seen

many of these atrocities with his own eyes and

he tells us so here

it says YOLO VI I

have seen this he

saw people starving to death on the streets he

saw executions and he saw a sorts

controversially he is saying that the Spanish can be just as cruel and sadistic

as the French Goya

boldly refuses to take sides and that was something we'd never seen before

we can divide the etchings into three groups the

early ones are Works about the Napoleonic

invasion the second group concerned

the famine that followed when Goya

witnessed the mistreatment of the poor by the wealthy

in this etching the

upper class man cruelly

mimics the beggar and then the final group documents

Spain's move towards absolutism

and satirize the church

here a priest walks on a frayed and tattered rope as

a woman cries the

Rope is breaking in

goya's original sketch for the print the precarious

Crossing was made by the pope but in a rare Act of self-censorship

Goya downgrades him for the most part the

ettings transcend specifics goya's

work is universal because it has deep compassion

for all victims of war

and an understanding of suffering which affects all of us and is at the

heart of our Humanity

here A Lone Survivor is faced with a world of Devastation

destruction and suffering and he cries out in

there is no one to help them

Goya was 62 when he began work on the etchings in secret and

he would finish them under the rule of Ferdinand

VII but they wouldn't get published until 35

years after goya's death

they were just two in Century as

he denounces both violence

and abuse of it would have been impossible

to publish them while Ferdinand

was still alive ferdinand's

decision to censor goya's

two paintings made it a most difficult time for the artist he

was still under investigation

for his role during the French occupation

and thanks to ferdinand's

dislike of him goya's

commissions dried up so in 1819

at the age of 73

he moved to a farmhouse in the countryside where

isolated from the Spanish Court in

complete secrecy he created some of the most extraordinary

images in the history of Art

what is rarely mentioned is that yes The Farmhouse was isolated

but its position was such that Goya

could actually see the Royal Palace

up on the hill from his house

so some of the most politically charged works of his career were

created as he overlooked

his former life of privilege

left alone in the dark he

was free to create monsters

Los capricos and the disasters of War were horrific images that

he either didn't publish or withdrew immediately because of fear of reprisal

but with the black paintings he was isolated enough from Madrid that he could

express himself exactly how he wanted to safe

from prying eyes he set about producing

an extraordinary cycle of 14 Works

painted directly onto the wallpaper

of the two floors of his

Goya lived and worked like a Hermit and

we don't even know what he called them as he never mentioned them signed

them or titled them and

apart from his maid nobody

else saw them the

very fact that Goya created them as fresco paintings instead

of the more usual canvas

and oil is proof enough that

he never expected his paintings to be displayed in public

Goya intentionally created them in private because they were so provocative

D3 long after his death the house was bought by Baron Emil de longer

he had goya's paintings along with the wallpaper peeled

from the walls and then transferred

onto canvas if you've ever tried to strip wallpaper

you know how impossible that delicate task would have been many

of the details were lost and sections

had to be repaired by restorers

and some were purposely altered

for ascetic reasons as we shall see

luckily for posterity the paintings were photographed

in situ in 1874

before they were removed

and thanks to these images we

have a record of where they were and

what condition they were in

there's more than one way to look at these paintings I

think the deafness Madness

angle has been overstated

he had been deaf for over 30 years at this point and

there is no evidence of Madness in his letters or elsewhere

we have to see them in the context of political and religious turmoil

these are paintings by an old tired

man stripped of his status and wealth

disappointed and angry with the world and

desperate to express it in the only way he knows how in

paint there are 14 of them in total and although they are not necessarily

linked thematically they are linked technically

for most of them Goya

used as his base a thick layer of black paint

directly onto the plaster walls

on top of which he created the characters with

lighter shades of whites

Grays ochres and Earth

the oil palette is very limited and his brush work is

Broad energetic and loose echoing

a morally chaotic world

these brush Strokes are impressionistic

long before the Impressionists

existed let's look at the theories behind

the black paintings one

by one see the passage of goya's

disillusionment in this one image

this painting is the exact same subject matter painted

by Goya 30 years previously

they show the feast of Saint Isadora

which takes place every 15th

of May when Goya

painted it in 1788

it is full of light and joy but

30 years later that

world had become a nightmare

30 years which saw the French Revolution the

rise and fall of Napoleon

the occupation of Spain and

the horrendous Guerrilla war that followed

the extension of the Inquisition and

the restoration of a dictator King

the earlier painting commissioned

for a princess is

a celebration full of young people dancing

and drinking and having

the later version is the exact same scene but the sky has turned from

glorious sunshine to dark and stormy

where once the revelers sang along to Brass bands the source of the music

is now a lone madman

the once orderly crowd are now a seething mass of Madness

no longer laughing but howling in agony and

the reason for their pain is right in the middle of the massive bodies

staring out at us

Napoleon Bonaparte 20 other political figures have been identified in goya's

Black paintings this to me seems

to contradict the belief that the paintings had no real meaning or

were purely the product of goya's

psychiatric decline this painting is said to be another procession

to the sanctuary of San Isidro

which is not far from The Farmhouse Goya

was living in but

the painting is also known as the Inquisition

Goya portrayed many processions

and celebrations over the years from

the lighter toned burial of the Sardine to

the dark and cruel procession of the flagellants

as far as Spanish liberals

were concerned of which Goya

Was Won these ceremonies represented

ignorance and Superstition something

from the past Goya

emphasizes it in this painting by dressing them in 17th

century fashions one of the figures stands out more than others a

man dressed in 17th

century clothes with a mustache

and a goatee holding

a sword in one hand and a roll of paper in the other

he has been identified as an Inquisitor

dressed in the uniquely Spanish style of stiff color gordogolia

and wearing a the figure next to him he is colluding with is a

friar and the surrounding characters are

celestinas or procuracies Goya

has portrayed them before old

women who exploit young girls for their own

Goya has emphasized these superstitious

beliefs aesthetically by having the main character shrouded

in complete darkness while the opposite corner in the distance is

full of light this

is a good example of how some of the works were altered by the

restorer if we look at the photo of the witch's Sabbath before the painting

was removed we see that the original was much wider

the restorer has seen fit to remove the sides of the canvas ignoring

that Goya often used empty

space for dramatic effect this

changes the work center of balance and positions the woman in white nearer

the middle of the composition and

so Shifting the focus of the painting The

he goat or Saturn preaches from a small Mound his

mouth is wide open giving

instructions to the old crones around him he

is dressed as a priest which makes an obvious anti-clerical

statement he is surrounded by obsequious

women with Bastille Twisted faces

thought to be witches

Spain was simultaneously marked by the enlightenment fervent

Catholicism and a widespread belief in the Supernatural

most people believed in witches

as we saw Goya

has used witchcraft images before in

Los capriccios and in a similarly themed painting 30

years earlier he also features a he-goat

surrounded by a ring of terrified women

goya's use of tenebrism

throughout the black paintings was popularized

by the 17th century Spanish artist Jose

De Rivera whom Goya admired as

well as his hero Rembrandt

who used tenebrism to

heighten dramatic effect the

woman in white looks

suspiciously like a nun the

way she is separate from the others suggests

she is a new initiate

into the coven this

is a dangerous painting

remember the Inquisition is

still in operation as Goya

painted these images the he goat and his followers are the very antithesis

of reason and enlightened

thinking and this is a bitter critique of a church that would often condemn

ideas of science as subversive

and accuse enlightened thinkers of being agents

of the devil here

we see two old men enveloped

in an intense Blackness

which really emphasizes the characters one

man is holding a cane and another beast-like

figure appears to be talking into his ear it

was a common theme of goya's

insanity or irrationality represented

by demons hovering over men

art Scholars have pointed out that the round-shaped

mouth in goya's art often

indicates a demon figure's communication

figure here is actually shouting

so this could be an allusion to goya's

deafness as with all the other black paintings we can't be totally sure who's

who but I think this is a self-portrait

of Goya who was well into his 70s at this point particularly

if we compare it with this later self-portrait

he created as Goya

didn't name any of the black paintings over the years the works have been

given many titles and

an alternative to this one was the two monks due to the bearded man

possibly wearing a monk's habit but

I think there is another explanation

Goya once said that his teachers were nature

Rembrandt and Velazquez Goya

worshiped Velasquez and was often inspired by his works in the Royal

this portrait of Francisco Cabarrus

by Goya is said to have been based on the Velasquez portrait of Pablo

de valadolid if we flip the painting of the two old men we

can compare it to a painting created 200

years before the black paintings

we know that Goya admired this particular painting by Velasquez

in fact he admired the painting so much he reproduced

it as an etching which

as we saw earlier was created back to front

I don't think it's a coincidence that

the character in Velasquez work is manipus

a figure from ancient Greece who wrote satire

and is known as one of the great cynic philosophers

this would fit in exactly

with goya's thinking if

we compare two old men to the original photo by jean-laur

taken before the removal we can see that the painting was in a poor

state of repair with

a large crack in the plaster in the upper right hand corner

restoration was not the exact science it is today and

as many of the paintings were smudged badly

cracked and smeared with plaster the restorer

Salvador Martinez cuvels took the initiative of restoring them to their original state as

much as possible and

he was occasionally heavy-handed

however it is thanks to kuvel's

that we the public have

access to them today the

man who bought goya's

house after his death Baron

Emil de longer have

planned to sell them at the universal exhibition

of 1878 but kuvals

was a painfully slow worker

and by the end of 1875

only four of the 14 paintings

have been transferred from the walls of the house

luckily for us this

prompted de longer to

change his mind and donate them to the Spanish government

it might be worth looking at these two paintings together as

they were next to each other in The Farmhouse and

are sometimes seen as companion pieces

both of the works are smaller in scale than the others both

are vertical and both have a lighter theme despite

being chromatically darker they

also share an identical lighting

both works are difficult to interpret due to the poor state of conservation

which lost part of the original paint when transferred

from the war to Canvas women

laughing seems to be the key to this pair of paintings it

is unusual for Goya as it is overtly

sexual and shows a man pleasuring

himself as two hags or prostitutes

laugh at him Goya

was actually quite reserved

and prudish and rarely painted sexualized

images and so perhaps it

is one he would have only created in secret

the other men reading

shows a group of six men shrouded

in darkness three men huddle around a newspaper

or magazine that the central figure has on his lap

his shirt is illuminated

by a triangle of Light which

points our gaze in the direction of the newspaper

the men gather around the central character

in order to hear him better two

more men are in the background one

of them gazing upwards

was added by the restorer

this work has also been called the politicians

as it is thought they are discussing a newspaper article about

if so it would make sense that the historian Francisco Javier

de Salas compared the incessant

Talk of the politicians

in men reading to

the solitary pleasure of

the man mocked by two women

this is the moment in the Old Testament when Judith and her maidservant

cut off the head of the tyrant holopharnis

it is often seen in art as a story of triumph over tyranny

which I discuss in my film about Artemisia

gentileschi Goya moves away from the simple traditional

portrait of the Bible story takes

it out of any specific setting

removes all of the peripheral iconographies

and focuses only on the action the

Judith he portrays could easily be a woman from goya's

time and that is the point

it is the very immediacy

which reminds us of goya's

history with Ferdinand VII

it is quite possible that

the Tyrant Hollow furnace is

an allusion to the king and Judith to the Spanish Nation

even behind closed doors this was a brave and daring choice for an artist

with such ties to the crown as Goya

had in parts of Spain fights

where opponents can Club each other to death was still allowed in goya's

day the two men dressed

according to goya's times are

beating the life out of each other the

man on the left is covered in blood and

the man on the right is shielding his

as they smash each other to a pulp they slowly sink into quicksand

or do they we

know substantial changes were made after removal

and the original photo shows

that Goya painted The Fighter standing in High Grass rather

than knee deep in

either way I think we can see that the scene of brutal and pointless

violence is an allusion to the upheaval

in Spain a picture of tribalism

a country tearing itself apart

goyer is saying this

is this work is also known as The Witches but to me the figure

seem fairly genderless we

think it was above the doorway to the kitchen where food was delivered to

Goya by his maid

in my opinion it is possible that goyer is going back to a theme

he attacked that of the gap between the Habs and the

in this case via

an allegory of gluttony

as the figures Loom forward out of the darkness the one on the left

is attacking the food with gusto

a manic grin on its face and

purposely turning away from the other figure who

is practically a skeleton already

dead and this is one of the smallest of the series which means the

work was easy to remove and

needed little restoration x-rays

show us it was barely reworked

so the brushwork is exactly how Goya

intended and we see that the artist is at his most impressionistic

here paint is handled quickly but with the kind of firm hand you

only get with a lifetime of experience

interpretation of a mythological

subject the moirai or

the sisters of Fate from classical literature

on the left is clotho

the youngest sister she

is usually seen spinning the thread of life but Goya

has her holding a newborn baby

lakesis the second sister holds

a Looking Glass ready to inspect the thread of life

an outropos the eldest sister is carrying scissors which

she will use to

either cut the thread of life or

not Goya has added a fourth figure not

featured in The Myth a man with his hands tied behind his back is

this Goya helpless to his fate controlled

by outside forces and unable to stop what is going on around him I

think the peculiar replacement of clotho

spinning tool with a baby holds

a more personal meaning

Goya and his wife had at least eight children but

only one survived into adulthood

their married life was plagued by dozens of miscarriages

and infant deaths In

classical mythology the sisters of Fate are said to appear three nights after a

child's birth to determine the course of its life

clotho presides over the moment we are born and

the baby she is holding is still attached by the thread of life but

unfortunately by the time we get to altropos

the threat of life has

already been cut the

baby's cruel fate is decided and the fourth figure possibly

Goya can do nothing to help

La liocardia is different from the others in the series he

didn't use a black base color here and

aesthetically she is a lighter contrast from the more monstrous

images also known as the seductress

is based on his maid and probable lover

leocardia as with any of the paintings from the series the

current title was not guerra's

own most historians believe one

of his well-known portraits

is of Leo cardia the

black painting here Bears

a strong resemblance to the portrait

after his wife's death leocardia

moved in with Goya along with her daughter Rosario

to care for him

she stayed with him in the countryside until 1824.

when Goya once again under scrutiny

quickly abandoned Spain to live in

Leo cardia followed him with Rosario

and stayed there until his death in 1828.

he taught the young Rosario

how to paint and she later had a career as a painter in France

and Spain many people myself

included think Rosaria is goya's

illegitimate child Leo cardier was known to be a striking good-looking woman for the

time she had a strong fiery

character and based on goya's letters her

Manna often upset him he

left her out of his will which was quite common for Mistresses

penniless she moved into rented

accommodation and lived in poverty

selling the occasional Goya drawing to survive

Goya portrays her dressed in a dark almost funeral dress

worn by the lower class women of Madrid known

as Maha in reality Leo

cardia would not have worn these clothes as

they were beneath her but

Goya was fixated on the maha's

elaborate outfits and sense of style in dress as well as by their cheeky

Behavior this painting from over 20 years before the black paintings is of the

Duchess of Alba one of Spain's leading Nobles she

is dressed here in elegant and expensive French Fashions of the day Goya

was infatuated with her and

two years later he

painted her in a scandalously

low-cut Maha outfit an

erotic proletariat type that appealed to Goya

Leo cardia leans against what looks to be a burial mound and the speculation

is that it is goya's

grave and that she is there to mourn the end of Goya

some experts interpret the figure as the personification

of melancholy since she seems to be meditating on

life and death x-ray

investigations of the image shows

that originally she lent on a door or a fireplace and that she had

no Veil signifying mourning and

at some point possibly

a more despondent time he

added a darker theme

we think Leo cardia is one of the final Works he painted in the

series named by his friend Antonio brugada

and it is also known by its alternative title fantastic

vision in Jewish Legend asmodeus

was the prince of demons and Hell the

main focus here is on the two floating figures one male and one female

they both seem terrified she

covers her face and is looking in the opposite direction as

if they are being chased

he points to the town at the top of the mountain possibly

the Rock of Gibraltar

which was a refuge for Spanish liberals

during the aftermath of the peninsula

War the crowd with horses and wagons appeared

to be refugees running from danger in

the foreground facing the figures of

the French army from the 3rd of May 1808

taking aim at the defenseless crowd seeking refuge in

this is the most famous of the black paintings the

most horrific and the most discussed

I think the first thing to say is

that it is probably more shocking to us than it was to the 19th

century we have to see it in the context of the rise of Romanticism

and its obsession with the Gory and the supernatural

which led to the rise of the gothic novel and

the popularity of entertainment

such as phantasmagoria popular

at the time with audiences

in Madrid where images of monsters and ghoulish subject matter were

projected in theaters using

having said that the

cannibalism angle is particularly grotesque

and it's even more horrifying

that Goya painted it on the walls of his dining room

the story is from the mythological

tale of the Greek god Kronos

the Romans called him Saturn

in it Saturn overthrew

his father to become the ruler of all the gods

afraid that history would repeat itself he

ate or rather swallowed

whole five out of his six children

but here Saturn is not swallowing the body whole but gnawing down on it

in a frenzied and horrific attack it

has been tackled before by artists but goya's

version is different it

is not a baby's body as in the myth but a grown adults

which makes it even more disturbing

and we can back that up with

this incredible 1797 sketch

Goya did which clearly shows it was intended to be an adult

Saturn's expression is terrifying

this is not a God reveling

in Revenge as gods do it

is not a celebration

Saturn is shocked by his own monstrousness

he is fully aware just how terrible an act he commits against his own

flesh and blood but

he just can't stop himself

and that is horrifying

the raw flesh of the figure is

the flesh that Goya witnessed all over Madrid

as innocent citizens were cut down in the street by armed men poverty

and hunger left a mass of starving bodies in the city and

piles of corpses were

left to Goya had seen hell on Earth and he transcribed

what he saw for

future Generations but mostly I think this

is a painting about power

and just how far someone will go to retain power

how Saturn like Ferdinand

has used power not only to mistreat his own citizens hence

the adult corpse but

also to violently turn on those people

it shows us that

those in power will

use any means possible to hang on to that power

including eating their own

the most powerful image is not Saturn devouring

his son but the drowning dog the

most pessimistic and most wretched image of them all

it shows a dog's head gazing

upwards lost in the vastness of the rest of the image alone

and drowning slowly in quicksand the

dog is looking upwards

at someone or something outside

of the in the original photo

it was discovered that the dog is looking at two birds flying in the

sky which disappeared from the painting when it was transferred

from the walls to the

to me the fact he sees birds flying free makes

the image even more tragic

we have seen horrific images before in many paintings

but usually no matter how ghastly there

is salvation in the black paintings

there is no sense that the sacrifice of human life is going to lead

to Salvation in fact it

doesn't a Saturn is eventually overthrown

by one of his sons and

for the dog there

is no salvation no

hope and there is no

God this dog is goya's

stand-in for Humanity struggling

alone just like the dog we

are looking to the sky for a miracle that

will never come Goya

left Spain at the age of 78

to start over in France

and he died there a patriot in Exile four

years later in 1828

in a Macabre twist to the Goya story in

1901 his body was exhumed

for transfer back to Spain and

it was then discovered

that his skull was missing like

the black paintings themselves

there are many theories about what happened to his skull But

ultimately it remains a

the painter who was so skilled at getting into other people's heads

eventually lost his own

Goya has been called the most radical artist that ever lived the

last of the Old Masters

and the first of the moderns

but the word that comes up again and again with Goya

is truth he was a prescient artist who became the chronicler of a violent

age and gave us uncomfortable

truths that are as relevant today as

they ever were he

showed us that Ordinary

People are capable of evil and

can do extraordinary and

that sometimes when we are looking for Monsters

we should look within ourselves