For the great names of the seventeenth century had been succeeded by painters of inferior ability and the positions of favor at court were held by foreigners. The decline of painting had kept pace with national decline. Spain under the Bourbon dynasty reaped the whirlwind that had been sown by the Hapsburg. Trade and commerce had been reduced to nothing; and while a few noble families had grown rich the country was poor, even the Court being impoverished. The Church had sunk from its high estate, and, devoted to worldly ambitions, had lost the respect of the community. The national character was demoralised. The lower classes had become brutalised, while society was callous and the Court openly profligate. When Goya entered on his prime, the impotence of the King, Charles IV, had permitted the government to slip into the hands of the Queen’s favorite, the ex-guardsman, Manuel Godoy. He had been raised to the rank of Duke of Alcudia and made prime minister of the realm. For bringing to conclusion a war with France in which he had needlessly engaged, he ostentatiously assumed the title of the “Prince of Peace.” It has been related in a previous chapter how he ratted to Napoleon and favored the design to place Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain, thereby subjecting Spain to the horrors of a French invasion under Murat and to the prolonged distress of the Peninsular war.
Symptomatic of the moral atmosphere of the Court is an anecdote mentioned in Doblado’s Letters. The King, surrounded by members of his household, was gazing from a window of the palace, when Mallo, who happened to be then first favorite with the Queen, drove by, handling a fine team of horses. “I wonder,” said the King, “how the fellow can afford to keep better horses than I can?” “The scandal goes, Sir,” replied Godoy, “that he is himself kept by an ugly old woman whose name I have forgotten.”
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On to the stage of this shabby comedy of court life, set with the scenery of a nation’s humiliation, Goya entered and made an immediate hit. A man of violent passions, without conscience or scruples, he played his part as if all the characteristics of his contemporaries were represented in himself. He has left a self-portrait, painted some seven years after his appearance on the scene. It now hangs in the Prado and might be mistaken for the portrait of a bull-fighter. Indeed, it reminds us that at one period of his young days Goya became efficient in the bull-ring. The neck is short and thick; the mouth fleshy and sensual; the nose broad; the cheeks large and heavily modeled; the cushioned brows indicate a hot, quick sensibility; there is a general suggestion of abounding animal force. Only the eyes, deep set and brilliant, proclaim the man’s mentality. It is the face of a peasant, which in his origin Goya had been.
His father was a small farmer in the village of Fuentedetodos in Aragón, where Goya was born in 1746. Bred hardily and possessed of great physical strength, the boy asserted his independence early and, determining to be an artist, sought instruction from a painter in Zaragoza. Here he soon gained notoriety for his escapades and was distinguished among his fellow students for his daring and his skill in the use of rapier and dagger. Finally he was wounded in some broil and hidden away by his friends to escape the clutches of the Inquisition, whose attention had been called to the affair. Accordingly, after his recovery Goya found it convenient to leave Zaragoza. He made his way to Rome, where he stayed for several years, indulging his appetite for adventure and intrigue on a larger scale. He again fell foul of the Inquisition, through an attempt to remove a young lady from a convent and would have fared ill, but for the intervention of the Spanish ambassador, who promised to see that the offending artist returned to Spain. So in 1769 Goya arrived in Madrid. Shortly after his appearance in the capital Goya married the daughter of the painter, Francisco Bayeu. She must have been a lady of exceptional forbearance, since she remained true to him notwithstanding his frequent amours and presented him with twenty children.
Bayeu introduced his son-in-law to Raphael Mengs, who was in the height of favor at Court. This German painter, who had been invited to Spain by Charles III, owed his European reputation to his servile imitation of his namesake, Raphael. He was a facile, academic mannerist; drawing inspiration for his subjects from the Classics and rendering them with a purity of style that was absolutely bloodless. He was, however, sufficiently large-minded to discover value in the young Goya. The King had requested his Court painter to make an effort to revive the Royal Tapestry Works of Santa Barbara, and Mengs was engaging painters to execute designs. He gave a series to Goya, who prepared the cartoons which are now in the Prado. Some of them were executed in the weave and can be seen in a room of the Escoriál, adjoining another, decorated with tapestries after designs by Teniers. The latter’s example may have influenced Goya in his choice of subjects, for he took the theme of popular pastimes and treated them naturalistically. The significance of this lies in its contrast to the conditions then existing. For the tapestries which were à la mode at that time both in France and Spain were the Boucher designs, in which little court gentlemen and ladies play at being shepherds and milkmaids, and indulge in pretty travesties of country life, under conditions of an impossible and ridiculous age of innocence. As we come to know Goya we are not
| MAIA, NUDE | GOYA |
| THE PRADO | |