Goya and artworks

Jp. A. Calosse

• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781781608210
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Monografías de artistas

Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The entrance to his world is not barricaded with technical difficulties. He proved that if a man has the capacity to live and multiply his experiences, to fight and work, he can produce great art without classical decorum and traditional respectability. He was born in 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small mountain village of a hundred inhabitants. As a child he worked in the fields with his two brothers and his sister until his talent for drawing put an end to his misery. At fourteen, supported by a wealthy patron, he went to Saragossa to study with a court painter and later, when he was nineteen, on to Madrid. Up to his thirty-seventh year, if we leave out of account the tapestry cartoons of unheralded decorative quality and five small pictures, Goya painted nothing of any significance, but once in control of his refractory powers, he produced masterpieces with the speed of Rubens. His court appointment was followed by a decade of incessant activity – years of painting and scandal, with intervals of bad health. Goya's etchings demonstrate a draughtsmanship of the first rank. In paint, like Velázquez, he is more or less dependent on the model, but not in the detached fashion of the expert in still-life. If a woman was ugly, he made her a despicable horror; if she was alluring, he dramatised her charm. He preferred to finish his portraits at one sitting and was a tyrant with his models. Like Velázquez, he concentrated on faces, but he drew his heads cunningly, and constructed them out of tones of transparent greys. Monstrous forms inhabit his black-and-white world: these are his most profoundly deliberated productions. His fantastic figures, as he called them, fill us with a sense of ignoble joy, aggravate our devilish instincts and delight us with the uncharitable ecstasies of destruction. His genius attained its highest point in his etchings on the horrors of war. When placed beside the work of Goya, other pictures of war pale into sentimental studies of cruelty. He avoided the scattered action of the battlefield, and confined himself to isolated scenes of butchery. Nowhere else did he display such mastery of form and movement, such dramatic gestures and appalling effects of light and darkness. In all directions Goya renewed and innovated.

Table of contents

• Biography
• Adoration of the Name of God by Angels
• La Novillada
• Wounded Mason
• Yard with Lunatics
• Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
• Miracle of St Anthony of Padua
• Nude Maja
• Clothed Maja
• The Countess of Chinchon
• The Family of Charles IV
• Cannibals Preparing Their Victims
• Cannibals Gazing at Their Victims
• Don Manuel Godoy as Commander in the “War of the Oranges”
• Doña Isabel de Porcel
• Francisca Sabasa y García
• Marquisa of Santa Cruz
• El Maragato Points a Gun at Friar Pedro
• The Meadow of San Isidro (detail)
• Friar Pedro of Zalvidia Diverts El Maragato’s Gun
• Struggle between Friar Pedro and Maragato
• Friar Pedro Strikes El Maragato
• Friar Pedro Fires on El Maragato
• Friar Pedro of Zalvidia Binds Maragato Hand and Foot
• The Colossus
• The Grinder
• The Water Carrier
• Majas at Balcony
• General Nicolas Guye
• Caridad (Charity)
• Y non hai remedio (This is Worse)
• Disasters of War
• Lo peor es pedir (The Worst is to Beg)
• The Forge
• The Bullfight
• Inquisition Scene
• Use of a Pulley
• Hunter Loading His Gun
• Hunter with His Dog, Waiting
• Hunter with His Dog
• Hunter with His Dog Bringing back a Rabbit
• Ferdinand VII
• Second of May 1808
• Third of May 1808
• No se puede mirar (This is too painful to look at!)
• Que crueldad! (What Cruelty!)
• Divina Libertad (Divine Liberty)
• Self-Portrait
• Portrait of Mariano Goya
• Temeridad de Martincho en la plaza de Zaragoza (The bullfighter Martincho performing a daredevil feat in the Saragosse ring)
• Desgracias acaecidas en el tendido de la plaza de Madrid, y muerte del alcalde de Torrejón (Unfortunate events in the front seats of the ring Of Madrid and the death of the Mayor of Torrejon)
• El célebre Fernando del Toro barilarguero, Obligando à la fiera con su garrocha (The celebrated Fernando del Toro draws the fierce beast with his pike)
• Banderillas de fuego (Banderillas of Fire)
• Que se rompe la cuerda! (May the Rope Break!)
• Saints Justa and Rufina
• Last Communion of St Joseph of Calasanz
• Agony in the Garden
• Goya Treated by Arrieta
• Saturn Devouring His Children
• Pilgrimage to San Isidro
• La Leocadia
• The Dog
• Two Foreigners
• Fantastic Vision or Asmodea
• Judith
• The Big Goat
• Two Old Men
• Promenade of the Holy Office
• Farnese Hercules
• Friar Playing the Guitar
• Dibersión en España (Entertainment in Spain)
• Milk Girl from Bordeaux