Visions and Nightmares
Goya. Text by X. Desparmet-Fitzgerald. (The Gallery of Masterpieces : Hamish Hamilton, 4 gns.) HERE are two sombre and powerful books on Goya. The first is a series of drawings, the second is a selection of his paintings, and if this notice gives more space to the former it is because wash drawings are more satisfactory to reproduce, and for the portentous nature of its contents.
They are a set of drawings from a sketch-book, now in the.Prado, all without exception of melan- choly and dreadful subjects, and giving a most intimate and personal contact with the painter's mind. So many exclamations of pity and horror, and they seem to have been drawn with no other purpose in view but the satisfaction of his own inner conscience, Of what other use to him could be the sketch of a beggar on a little low cart or trolley with his leg hideously swollen into bolster- shape by elephantiasis? Such is a theme neither for a tapestry-cartoon nor painting. This is a drawing probably done in little longer than it has taken me to write this paragraph, and as with most of the series Goya has added a pungent motto below it written with his brush, but per- haps not at the moment, but later, looking over a batch of the drawings when he felt like it.
His mood in this respect being that of the Caprichos which are earlier in date, for this series of drawings that is without a collective name or title dates from the years of Napoleon's invasion of Spain. It continues with a group of nine fearful nightmare visions, working up, as it were, to the paintings done in about the same years in his
country house outside Madrid.' And soon, with the caption, 'This one has many relatives and some
• rational.' there is a drawing of a raving maniac as frightening as any of those in the old and fear- stained Mad Humanity (by L. Forbes Winslow, 1898). Gone are the last Spanish graces of the Caprichos, and the drawings reach to their climax
with seven or eight drawings of victims of the Inquisition.
The poor creatures are at the auto-da-fe, wear- ing the ghastly livery of coroza and sanbenito,
that is to say, a high dunce's cap of cardboard usually painted with devils, and a yellow garment, scapular-shaped, and inscribed with the culprit's name and crime. 'After the execution,' the text tells us, 'each sanbenito was sent to the victim's parish church, there to be exhibited as a memorial of shame to him and his descendants.' As late as the end of the eighteenth century sets of these dreadful relics were still on view in the palace of the Inquisition at Goa in Portuguese India, but that is another story. It will be sufficient to mention a pair of Goya's drawings, that cap- tioned 'I saw her, Orosia Moreno, in Zaragoza. Because she knew how to make mice,' and 'For having no legs.'
The making of mice in order to pester others. we read in Jose Lopez-Rey's notes, was an ordinary charge against persons suspected of witchcraft. This was, therefore, an actual scene that Goya witnessed before 1808, the year of his last visit to his native town, and, also, by coinci- dence, the year in which executions were for- bidden by the Inquisition. There she is on her stool, gagged and muzzled, and one is left gasp- ing in horror at what is to happen next. 'For hav- ing no legs' depicts a legless beggar on the stool of punishment, in his high dunce's cap, looking down at his crutches, short crutches of the sort that, being legless, were all he needed.
The drawing has a caption in Goya's writing saying that he knew this man, but the rest is obliterated by a later inscription in his hand so that we know no more except that the first piece of writing seems to say he had seen this legless man begging outside Zaragoza, only to find him again begging at the gate of the Alcala. in Madrid. Whatever sorcery, then, can he have been con- victed of? It is almost a relief after this to look at the drawing of a garrotted man, safely dead, at least, and called 'For liking a she-ass,' a title which can be given various and sinister mean- ings. And for an end there is a drawing of a man with his shirt pulled down being hustled by a top-hatted executioner towards the guillotine, a drawing which is every bit as much of a portrait as David's , well-known sketch of Marie- Antoinette's being driven backwards in the tumbril.
I am afraid it cannot be said that Goya's paint- ings in The Gallery of Masterpieces are any more cheerful. Except for one picture, The Pradera de San Isidro, a fair and a scene of merry-making just outside Madrid. This is of the period of the cartoons for tapestry, before Goya's deafness, when there are still traces and echoes of Tiepolo, but working, prophetically, towards the full impressionist handling of Manet. The huge group of the Royal Family comes along, inevitably, and once more a private theory may be offered, which is that the picture was painted and accepted because it amused the King and Queen. Surely this is the only explanation,
Goya must ,not be made into too Beethoven. like a figure. He was a Spaniard, first and last. And neither should we be too certain of his liaison with the Duchess of Alba, a thing which
can be explained on quite other grounds of patronage and friendship.
The tremendous Dos de Mayo and its com- panion painting arc more opportune now than ever. The man in the white shirt with outstretched arms in the second picture is once more the symbol of an enslaved country. He is being shot, and dying in vain; but the scale of his genius which makes Goya universal at such moments is no excuse for making of the painter one of the prophets of world revolution. He is only happy, as can be judged from the painting of a bull-fight, when he is demonstrably in Spain. And the book ends far from happily, but in Spanish vein, the theme of its last pages being the aforesaid night- mare visions from the walls of his country house. The horrifying painting of Saturn detouring his children hung in his dining room!
SACHEVERELL SITWELL
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