I'm the first to admit that I've earned no expert authority as yet about art on the whole, but as an undergraduate student less than a year shy of completing my major coursework, it's fair enough to say that I at least know a lot about art. Within that, I of course know something more than the average person about Fransisco de Goya, the Spanish painter of the late 18th/early 19th century. However, there's something about him that has always bothered me. It might be more accurate to say that his art has always actually somewhat disturbed me. There's a vein of darkness that runs through his entire body of work that I find dramatically chilling.
Goya began his career as a member of the Spanish Royal Academy and made his name by painting in the courts of King Charles III and IV. Fiercely proud of his country and his heritage, Goya established himself squarely within Spanish artistic tradition following his most famous precursor, Diego Velazquez. Visually speaking, this meant that Goya had a painterly (i.e. loose) style and sought some degree of realism in everything he did. What was different from Velazquez, however, was how far Goya insisted upon taking this idea of non-idealized realism, transforming reverent art into a dose of harsh reality. Even when it came to paintings of the king himself and his family, Goya described them visually with every possible failing - King Charles IV with his cock-eyed physiognomy, some families members with their faces turned away from the onlooker, and my personal favorite, an elderly female relative who looks absolutely batty and has a large black pockmark on her face (a symptom of syphilis). He obviously had an antagonistic relationship with his government, but was somehow clever enough to keep his royally patronized job long enough to satisfy his career.
Goya reveals much deeper and darker revelations in his series of etchings collectively known as the Disasters of War. Responding to the violence he saw during Napoleon's invasion, the Disasters are poignantly stark representations of the most base human conditions. They reduce people to animals and murderous villains as traumatic treatises on corruption and ignorance. The fact that he produced these etchings as a private endeavor reveals that this twisted pet project of Goya's was something of a personal fascination for him.
At the end of his life, Goya painted even more personal and even more disturbing images on the walls of his own home, collectively known as his Black Paintings. Having lost his hearing earlier in life, it seems that Goya finally succumbed to some sort of madness in his old age. The stand out from these works is undoubtedly Saturn Devouring his Own Children (see image) which Goya painted in his dining room of all places. My thesis here, after this extended introduction to the highlights of Goya's work, is that this brooding, tormented style indicates Goya's internal turmoil that likely affected him for his whole life. I believe his paintings are essentially symptoms of a serious psychological disturbance. I think that's why he's always bothered me - because when I look at his paintings, I have the suspicion that I'm very close to a madman. In fact, several of his works that I haven't mentioned deal with insanity or asylums. Perhaps Goya always begrudgingly knew that he belonged with those figures he so frequently painted. He is valued by many as a sort of proto-Romantic, focusing on the inspiration of genius within the artist himself rather than an institutional emphasis on theory and rules. And this is true of the artist, but I posit here that Goya was not merely inspired by his genius, but forcibly driven by it to the extremes of an underlying psychosis.Thanks to David McCarthy for insight and ArtStor.org for all image credits.
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