Goya. The Dead Branch
From “The Proverbs” (Lefort No. 126)
A reference to the Spanish court, which rests on a dead branch over an abyss
Size of the original etching, 8⅜ × 12⁹⁄₁₆ inches
In the modern craze for making over biographies of past worthies, so as to bring their lives into conformity with the standards of respectability in the present, there is a tendency to suggest that many of the records of Goya’s career may be apocryphal. This would rob the story of art of a very picturesque personality; one, moreover, which seems to be quite convincingly represented in his art. He was born in 1746, in the little town of Fuendetodos near Zaragoza in the province of Aragón, his father being a small farmer. Reared among the hills, he breathed independence, throve mightily in bodily vigor, and proved precociously disposed to art. Accordingly, at the age of fourteen he was put under a teacher, Luzan, in Zaragoza. But it was never Goya’s way to take instruction from a spoon, and at this period he distinguished himself less as a student than as a roistering young fellow, apt for gallantry and brawls and ready with his rapier. Having drawn on himself the attention of the authorities of the Inquisition, he found it convenient to proceed to Madrid. Here again his escapades aroused notoriety, so that he abandoned the capital and set forth for Rome, working his way to the sea-board by practising as a bull-fighter. In Rome he mainly nourished his artistic development by observation of the old masterpieces, meanwhile indulging in gallantries, which culminated in a plot to rescue a young lady from a convent. This time he found himself actually in the grip of the Inquisition and was only released from it by the Spanish ambassador, who undertook to ship him back to Spain. Arrived the second time in Madrid he found a friend in the painter Francisco Bayeu, who gave him his daughter, Josefa, in marriage and introduced him to Mengs, the arbiter of art at Court. Josefa bore him twenty children, none of whom survived him, and patiently put up with his infidelities. Mengs had been urged by the king, Charles III, to revive the Tapestry Works of Santa Barbara, and intrusted Goya with a series of designs, which to-day may be seen in the basement galleries of the Prado, while some of them, executed in the weave, adorn the walls of a room in the Escoriál. The vogue at the time was for Boucher’s pretty pastoral ineptitudes, but Goya took a hint from Teniers and represented the actual pastimes of the Spanish people. He, however, far outstripped the Flemish artist in the variety, naturalness, and vivacity of his subjects, while in the matter of composition he showed himself already a student of the harmonies of nature rather than a perpetuator of studio traditions.
These designs secured his general popularity and paved the way for his entrée into royal favor at the accession of Charles IV in 1788. Goya, turned forty, was already the darling of the populace and now became the cynosure of the Court. He would pit his prowess against the professional strong man in the streets of Madrid and plunged with equal aplomb and assurance into the gallantries of the royal circle, which was a hotbed of intrigue under the lax régime of Queen Maria Luisa, whose amours were notorious. Foremost among her lovers was Manuel Godoy, whom she raised from the rank of a guardsman eventually to be prime minister. He embroiled his country in a war with England, and finally ratted to Napoleon, conniving at the invasion of the French troops and the placing of Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain. Meanwhile, in the interval before this débâcle, Goya, while dipping into intrigue, notably with the beautiful Countess of Alba, and establishing his position as an artist to whom every one who would be anybody must sit for a portrait, maintained an attitude of haughty mental exclusiveness. He was the rebel, the insurgent, the nihilist; lashing with the impartial whip of his satire the rottenness of the Court and the shams and hypocrisies of the Middle Class, the Church, Law, Medicine, and even Painting. Also, like many devotees of sensual pleasures, he was hot in his denunciation of lust, a terrible exponent of its consequences in satiety and sapped vitality.
Goya. Back to His Ancestors!
“Poor animal! The genealogists and the kings of heraldry have muddled his brain, and he is not the only one.”
Manuel Godoy, satirized in this print, had a long and fictitious genealogy made for himself, according to which he was a direct descendant of the ancient Gothic kings of Spain.
From “The Caprices” (Lefort No. 39).