In his “Capriccios” Goya stands revealed as a figure without even a forerunner in the history of art. Satirical representations of popular superstitions, bitter, mordant attacks on the aristocracy, the government, and all social conditions, unprecedented assaults on the crown, on religion and its doctrines, inexorable satires upon the Inquisition and the monastic orders, make up this most remarkable book. It had hardly appeared in 1796 before the Inquisition seized it. Goya parried this stroke, however, by dedicating the plates to the king.

A painter and a colorist, in this book he displays his genius as an etcher. The outlines are drawn with light and genial strokes only; then comes the aquatinta, the colouring which overspreads the background, and gives localisation, depth, and light. A few scratches of the needle, a black spot, a light produced by a spot of white ingeniously left blank—that sufficed to give life and character to his figures.

The “Misères de la Guerre” are intrinsically more serious. All the scenes of terror that occurred in Spain as a sequel to the French invasion and the glory of Napoleon here utter their cry of lamentation. A few plates amongst them are worthy of comparison with the finest of Rembrandt’s,—the sole classic for whom Goya cherished a veneration. All the undertakings which followed these—the “Bull-fights,” the “Proverbs,” the “Captives,” the fantastic landscapes—tell of a long study of the great Dutch master. Especially celebrated were the seventeen new plates which he added to the “Malheurs de la Guerre” in 1814, at the time of the restoration of Ferdinand VII. They are the political and philosophical testament of the old liberal, the keen free-thinker, the last and utmost fight for all that he loved against all that he hated. With sacred wrath and biting irony he waged war against the intrigues and hypocrisy of the obscurantists who throttle progress and suppress freedom of thought. With passionate wrath he rushed upon kings, priests, and dignitaries. It seems incredible that the plate entitled “Nada”—a dead man, who comes out of his grave and writes with his corpse-fingers the word “Nada” (nothing)—that this plate can be the work of a Spaniard of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there is the same hatred of tyranny, of social injustice, of human stupidity, the same incredulous effort after a dimly conceived ideal of truth and liberty.

It is neither the amiable fairyland of Callot nor the bourgeois pessimism of Hogarth. Goya is more inexorable and acute; his phantasy, borne on larger wings, takes a higher flight. He sees direful figures in his dreams, his laugh is bitter, his anger rancorous. He is a revolutionist, an agitator, a sceptic, a nihilist. His chronique scandaleuse grows into the epos of the age. One understands why such a man should no longer feel secure in Spain, and, towards the close of his life, go into exile in France.

There, too, in the home of the revolution, art, ever since the beginning of the century, had freed herself more from the tradition of the Renaissance, and betaken herself to the new way, which the Dutch, and soon afterwards the English, had laid down in the seventeenth century.

From “Los Capriccios.”
GOYA.   DEVOTA PROFESION.

All that had been produced in Paris, up to the close of the seventeenth century, had had its birthplace in the Italy of Leo X. The light of the Italian Renaissance had suffused France ever since the appearance of Rosso and Primaticcio. Rome had been the cradle of Simon Vouet and Nicolas Poussin. France endeavoured, in rich decoration and masterly swing of lines, to overtop the Italians, whose formulæ were studied partly in Rome and partly in the Palace of Fontainebleau, that Rome in petto. Those religious pictures of Lebrun, arranged in panels, appeared with their theatrically elegant attitudes and their flowing drapery, with their slim, oscillating limbs and their florid gestures. All Olympus, all the saints and the heroes, were set to work to do honour to the great king. Was it necessary to glorify his acts, then it was done by portraying him as Cyrus or Alexander. The people of the seventeenth century did not exist for painters. Lebrun and Mignard, as inheritors of Roman culture, hovered over life without seeing it. Their ideals were a hundred and fifty years old, ingenious variations on the sixteenth-century pattern.

Then came the death of the Grand Monarque, and with him the tradition of the Renaissance went also to its grave. The old age was outworn, and the new began to supersede it. The world was weary of the majestic, the stiff, and the pompous, whose glamour had blinded it for sixty years. The sun-king was dead, and the sun of the Italian Renaissance had set. French society breathed once more. The ostentation of the court had become an onerous ceremony, the monarchical principle an unendurable constraint. The nightmare that had oppressed it, the ennui that had come from Versailles, disappeared. Air and light and mirth penetrated the salons. People shook off the heavy yoke of majesty from their shoulders, abandoned their heroic, ostentatious palaces, and bought themselves petites maisons in the Bois. They had suffered, they wished to be glad; they had been bored, they wished to be amused. Enough of pater-nosters and stately etiquette! they wished to live. Away with the antique temples and goddesses of Poussin! away with those devoted martyrs who mortified themselves and killed the flesh! Away with the semblance of the heroic, with pomp and glamour, with the service of God and the service of lords! Here’s to the service of the ladies. Here’s to the thatched roofs of farmhouses; the woods in whose thickets one can lose one’s way and exchange a kiss; rosy flesh and little turned-up noses; everything which gave a thrill of voluptuousness after the unapproachable, icy-cold nobility of the past. Long live Love!

“L’Art.”
GOYA.OTRES LEYES POR EL PUEBLO.

So thought France when Louis XIV was dead, and the man was already grown up in the Low Countries who was chosen to give a shape to these dreams, to abolish the ascendency of gods and kings and heroes, and to show the upper classes their own image reflected in the mirror of art.