Category: RealGoya Page 4 of 5

Last April 2013 has been “busy” in the Spanish media in relation to Goya and its timeliness.

Perhaps the most remarkable news is the referred to the study presented by the historian Carlos Foradada Baldellou, Professor of the University of Zaragoza, in which strongly affirms that authorship by Goya’s “El Coloso” should not be discussed nor be declassified by Prado Museum’s conservator Manuela Mena. The declassification, made with the endorsement of the director of the Museum, Miguel Zugaza, took place in June 2008.

Professor Foradada already made a very interesting contribution in 2010 with his study of the original contents of the “Black Paintings” by Goya in the photographs of Laurent. “The conclusions of a long process”. Published in Madrid, GOYA Art Magazine, nr. 333. October-December 2010. Pp. 320-339.

El Coloso. 1808-12  Oleo/lienzo. 116 x 105 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado

Therefore, Foradada, who has just published his last work in the scientific journal of the Aragonese Association of Art Critics, AACA, focuses on technical issues of the study and development of fine arts, and not exclusively in historiography type arguments like used by Mena in his time to award “El Coloso” to the hand of painter Asensio Juliá.

That unexpected declassify was reported adversely by the recently deceased Nigel Glendinning, possibly then the most serious and respected specialist in Goya, who the 1^st July 2008 expressed his flatly contrary opinion, and said forcefully that «what is happening is serious and sad, the Prado Museum admits things without sufficient study»

For anyone who has a curiosity for the study of arts in general, and drawing and painting in particular, will not result too strange the conscientious, very precise and full of seriousness and smartness way the great British specialists, such as Glendinning, put in their admirable research work.  These rigorous work methods try, usually with success, to meet exactly all the positive and negative aspects of each question, assaying up the details and most trivial strokes. So well, this comprehensive way of working is also that regularly used by the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world, in countries such as the United States, Germany, France, Italy or Poland, to name a few, among them, in good law, is Spain. Reason why is painfully remarkable the improvised way the Prado Museum concluded its declassification in 2008, and completed it with a ruling by January 2009 in which stated that the picture is from a indeterminate disciple of Goya, not even being able to ensure that was Juliá.

In his latest work, Foradada places the painting in its historical context and point out the influences of war events of the moment on his way to see the painting. It also confronts the picture with the known equestrian portrait of general Palafox, as well as emphasizes the painting technique used by Goya at that time. Free from prejudice of low value, and aside from subjective personal tastes more or less decisive, it systematizes and argues its study by denying the declassifying of “El Coloso” and ensuring that the Prado Museum “will have to rectify sooner or later”.

With similar arguments, Foradada reasonably refers to the declassification by Mena of both the portrait of Marianito Goya and “La lechera de Burdeos” (“The milkmaid of Bordeaux”).

Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (detalle) Oleo / lienzo. 127 x 101,6 cm. Nueva York, Metropolitan Museum. The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.41)

An interesting controversy then, adding new arguments to the ones made by most of the experts in the work of Goya, and pop up impressions that imply very different ways to classify the great masters of the universal History of Art.  Because one thing is that Rembrandt Research re-classified all the paintings of the master of chiaroscuro, affecting the Museum or any collection that would affect, and that the affected Museum give or fails to give explanations such as “they were not painted by Rembrandt, but are from that time”. Or the reasoned, rigorous and necessary new classification of their Goyas done by the Metropolitan Museum of New York, directed by Philippe de Montebello in September 1995.  That decision was, openly, trying to avoid disputes in regard with the authenticity and the best or worst attribution of certain works long considered as from the hand of Goya. But another quite different is what in Spain seems a sudden and subjective mistake of the Prado, in the confused and poorly adjusted operation of 2008 which continues revealing today, as did then, as hasty as useless.

Gonzalo de Diego

Hecuba is the second wife of Priam. His genealogy was the subject of controversy in Antiquity because, famous because of her fertility, it is said that she gave to Priam nineteen children; Euripides speaks of fifty. Apollodorus, however, says fourteen: Hector is the firstborn; Paris, surnamed Alejandro, the second, whose birth was preceded by a prophetic dream. A dream we are interested now especially.

Shortly before giving birth to her second child, had a strange dream: saw out of her bosom a torch, which set fire to the city of Troy, and even the forests of Ida. Consulted the soothsayers, they stated that the child who would be born would be cause of the ruin of the city.

The legend of the dream of Hecuba back to her the origins of crime which meant the downfall of Troy, because of being mother of Paris as for having refused to kill this one, against the opinion of the gods.

El sueño de  Hécuba. Giulio Romano

Giulio Romano, distinguished disciple of Raphael and who Vasari spots as his most brilliant collaborator, had to enter his workshop being still a boy. He soon worked according to the designs of the master and collaborated in the stanze of the Vatican.

Giulio Romano will illustrate the dream of Hecuba in one of his most famous paintings of the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (Italy), the city of Gonzaga. This topic will spur the imagination of Füssli inspiring him in his famous “Nightmare”.

El Sueño (detalle). Francisco de Goya. Oleo / lienzo. 46,5 x 76 cm. National Gallery Dublin. Irlanda.

In my book “Goya’s border” (see on this website) I affirm that there are authors who suggest that Goya knew The Nightmare of Füssli, exposed for the first time in 1782 and widely diffused then in form of engravings. And also Füssli, like Goya, show the dreamer and the dream vision, this means, both the physical presence of the dreamer as also his dream.

In this regard, the question is who was Füssli and how his “Nightmare”. As well, Johann Heinrich Füssli, (Zurich, February 7, 1741 – Putney Hill, London, April 16, 1825) was an excellent draughtsman, painter, historian of art and Swiss writer, later established in Britain, where is known as Henry Fuseli.

La pesadilla (The Nightmare) o El íncubo. Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1781. Oleo / lienzo.  101 x 127 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, USA

A woman asleep, owned by an Incubus (demon that occurs in dreams of erotic kind) is referred to by the head of a horse’s ghostly appearance. It is one of the most emblematic works of Füssli, specialized in issues related to loneliness, fear, satanism, eroticism and horror, which will inspire the satanic imagery of the 19th century. Its title in German, Nachtmahr, was the name of the horse of Mephistopheles.

Thematically Füssli is a representative closest to German romanticism, since their night and terrifying world is parallel to the dark romance of a Novalis or a Hoffmann. What makes him an important figure when to study the transition between neo-classicism and romanticism, and be able to consider him pioneered in the exploration of the irrational, a fact why with reason has been compared with Goya. Although shortly after his death fell in a relative oblivion, however would be later vindicated by the expressionists and surrealists, who saw it as a predecessor for his poetic of sublime, his allusion to the dream and its nightmare erotica.

Füssli made this work inspired by the Dream of Hecuba of Giulio Romano, although there are who assumed that he would inspire in the Dream of Raphael , by Marcantonio Raimondi.

El Sueño de Rafael. Marcantonio Raimondi (1474 – 1534). Primera mitad del siglo XVI. Grabado  230 mm x 330 mm. British Museum

Füssli performed at least two versions on the subject of the Nightmare, the most famous being that of 1781, today at the Detroit Institute of Arts; another, 1790-91, is located in the Goethes Elternhaus in Frankfurt am Main.

Anyway, this representation so characteristic of black romanticism keeps its model trying to sow doubt, give body to the unthinkable and requires the loss of control of the reason and the triumph of the imagination. The movement is well represented by works of artists such as Goya, Friedrich, Füssli, Delacroix, Redon, Munch, Ernst and also Salvador Dalí.

Gonzalo de Diego

It is not known with certainty how many children had Goya. There are some who claimthat seven children, and some, such as Guillermo Díaz Plaja, assert that they were twenty!(see “Goya en sus Cartas y otros escritos”. Heraldo de Aragón, Zaragoza, 1980. Page 28)Ansón says and collect eight children, and says that “all of them (Antonio, Eusebio, Vicente, a premature, María del Pilar, Francisco de Paula, Andrés and Francisco Javier) died at birth or being very children, except the last, Javier Goya and Bayeu, born on December 4th, 1784, who was the heir of the painter”.

Of course, children made with his wife Josefa (Pepa) Bayeu Subías, sister of Francisco, Ramon and fray Manuel.

Equally, Anson says that “the parents of Goya had a house in Zaragoza in MoreríaCerrada Street, in the parish of San Gil, until 1762. Being the house seized for debts, they had to move to another for rent in the Coso, against the so-called Rocks of the Coso, and years later to another in the street and square of San Miguel”.

Goya marries Josefa Bayeu, in Madrid, July 25th, 1773, in the parish church of SanMartin. The marriage lives in Zaragoza, their city, in which is born their first-born son, male, on August 29th, 1774. The day of his birth will be baptized in the parish of San Miguel de los Navarros, and ‘godparented’ by sculptor Carlos Salas.

The corresponding certificate of baptism is preserved in the archive of the parish of San Miguel de los Navarros, in Book 9 of the aforementioned file.

Whose transcription says as follows:

<<Baptized year 1774

(To the left margin: Ant Goya)

In the parish church of San Miguel de los Navarros, August, Twenty-ninth day of

Seventeen Seventy-Four year: I, Don Rafahel Royo, Regent of its 1st cure, baptized a child who was born the same day, son of Francisco Goya and Josefa Bayeu, born inZaragoza, legitimately married spouses, parishioners of this church and, to the present,living in this parish. To who was given the name of Antonio, Juan Ramón, Carlos. It was his godfather Don Carlos Salas, parishioner of San Felipe, to whom I warned the spiritualkinship had acquired and the obligation to teach the Christian doctrine of the baptized in the absence of their parents: and for the Truth I sign it.

Don Mariano Sostre y Hayeto Re>>

Down, in the same sheet in which has photocopied the certificate of baptism, is stamped aseal of the parish of San Miguel Q. S. D. of Zaragoza and over it, the signing of the parish priest, Don Fernando Arregui.

“Q. S. D.” (“Quis Sictvi (or Sicut) Deus”) means ´Who As God?’

Looking at the document, one can wonder about the figure of the godfather, Don Carlos Salas, and his undoubted great relationship with the parents of the newborn.

Besides, such closely character related to Goya is none other than the sculptor Carlos Salas Viraseca (Barcelona, 1728 – Zaragoza, March 30th, 1780), with which Francisco de Goya has ample relationship after coincide both in the work of the Pilar and, more specifically in their jobs -barely thirty meters from the other- in the posterior part of the Holy Chapel of mentioned Temple. Goya painted the fresco of the Regina Martirum and Carlos Salas had sculpted a work that F. Abbad Ríos described in “La Seo y el Pilar de Zaragoza” Ed. Plus-Ultra, Madrid, in the following way:

“In the back (of the Holy Chapel), and behind the altars, Carlos Salas carved a magnificent high-relief of the Assumption of the Virgin. At the top, Maria rises to the sky, sitting on clouds surrounded by angels. And at the bottom, the Apostles, around the empty grave, love her and stare at the mystery. This work was such a success that was thought to make it the main altar of the basilica and remove Forment’s altarpiece; but, fortunately, that idea was not carried out. Carlos Salas (*) is an understudied and,therefore, poorly known artist, who worked a lot in Aragon and Catalonia. This is surely his capital work; one of the most beautiful of the Spanish pre-neoclassicism.”

Gonzalo de Diego[/one_half_last]