A good time for thinking about Francisco Goya is while the world stumbles. Crisis becomes him. “Goya: A Portrait of the Artist” (Princeton), a biography by the American art historian Janis A. Tomlinson, affords me a newly informed chance to reflect on an artist of enigmatic mind and permanent significance. In the tumultuous Spain of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya worked for three kings—the reformist Carlos III, the dithering Carlos IV, and the reactionary Ferdinand VII—and then for social circles of the French usurper Joseph Bonaparte; for an overoptimistic three-year constitutional government; and, finally, woe to the land, for Ferdinand VII again. Goya kept landing on his feet as cohorts of his friends and patrons toppled from official favor, or worse. His increasingly naturalistic portraits—vivid in characterization and unconventionally flattering, with all but breathable tones and tints in dusky chiaroscuro ignited at times by clarion hues—sustained him at court despite the intrigues of rivals and schemers. It could be argued that the deafness that befell him in 1793 (possibly from lead poisoning), when he was forty-seven, and continued until his death, at eighty-two, in 1828, provided him some diplomatic padding, as he managed his interests with politic correspondence and the support of well-situated admirers. He was firmly prestigious by the time he took to making works of lacerating wit and escalating, ultimately horrific intensity. A stormy petrel skimming waves of change that swamped others, he introduced to history a model of the star artist as an anomalous spirit equipped with social acumen and licensed by genius. His nearest avatar is Andy Warhol.
Tomlinson’s dryly written accounts of the Spanish court are no Iberian “Wolf Hall,” but they feature arresting characters, such as the raffish antihero Manuel de Godoy. A twenty-four-year-old military officer when he was elevated by Carlos IV, in 1791, Godoy came to manage Spain’s crazily shifting alliances in a war with Revolutionary France and, when that went badly, one in league with France against Portugal, with Godoy promised a personal stake in the spoils. Big mistake. In 1808, Napoleon occupied Spain, made his brother the King, and discarded Godoy, who barely escaped the wrath of his betrayed fellow-citizens. (They made do with destroying nearly every available trace of him, such as portraits by Goya.) Rumored to be the lover of Carlos IV’s queen, María Luisa, Godoy may have commissioned, or at least incited, Goya to paint his only erotic nude, “The Naked Maja” (1797-1800). (Majas and their male equivalent, majos, were flamboyantly cheeky lower-class dandies.) The Inquisition impounded “The Naked Maja” and its clothed counterpart in 1813 and posed stern questions to Goya, which he seems to have successfully ignored. There can be a lucky charm, during treacherous times, in being really, really good at something. Imperilled after the Bourbon restoration of 1814 by a purge of collaborators with the French regime, Goya redeemed a painting that he had made of Joseph I by substituting, or having someone else do so, the face of Ferdinand VII. He was cleared. The country’s cultural establishment couldn’t spare Goya’s gifts, and arrivistes clamored to be portrayed by him.
Tomlinson addresses, with refreshing clarity, a chronic question of just how independent, not to say subversive, Goya was of the powers that employed him. She debunks a common oversimplification of Goya as a committed post-Enlightenment liberal. He was more complicated than that, and ineluctably strange. Uncanniness had to be part of his magnetism. There’s often something haunted or haunting in his portraits and in some of his religious and allegorical commissions, though not in the antic cartoons of Spanish life that were destined for tapestries, an irksome duty of his early career. It’s as if he always had something up his sleeve. That impression affected me strongly on a visit to the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, last year. Looking at his works can rouse the sensation of an alarm going off nearby, but you can neither understand the reason for its activation nor find it to turn it off.
Goya didn’t emerge as a master through a neat evolution of period styles. He can seem at once decadent and innovative, with some lingering tropes of the late Baroque and the rococo and the brassiness of the then fashionable neoclassicism along with utterly original freshets of Romanticism. Spanish art had become provincial. The country’s leading art educator was the mediocre German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who promulgated a sort of housebroken neoclassicism. In 1778, when Goya was thirty-two, he turned to Spain’s own lapsed glories, with a set of etched copies of seventeenth-century masterpieces by Velázquez, skeletonizing the art of the painterly demiurge in incised line with washes of aquatint. The hair-shirt exercise puzzled some of his fellow-artists. The renderings are spot on, but their reductions of color to line and shading are like a broadcast of the “Hallelujah” Chorus over a kid’s walkie-talkie. I think that Goya sought gains for painting through grasping what had been lost to it. No longer equal to illusions of reality, paintings were fated to become objects, real in themselves, of a certain kind. Rather than forge a signature style, Goya practiced a temperamental abnegation of anything usual. This kept—and keeps—him impossible to pin down: a deserter from the marching ranks of the Old Masters, forever on the loose.
An homage to Velázquez’s touchstone “Las Meninas” (1656) figures in perhaps the most beautiful group portrait ever painted. “The Family of Carlos IV” (1800-01) stands out in Goya’s portraiture as a one-off masterpiece on purpose, affirming for good the justice of his recent elevation to the first court painter. In the background, the artist gazes out from behind, it would appear, the very canvas that we behold, suggesting that he’s working from a mirrored view of the scene—an unlikely conceit that seems meant mainly, and wittily, to recall Velázquez’s similar self-portrayal in “Las Meninas.” (The jape amounts to a proto-modernist instance of art about art.) Thirteen lavishly clad persons, from the fifty-two-year-old monarch to a babe in arms, share a room awash in the softly shadowed, caressing light of a golden afternoon. They assume informal attitudes of everyday aplomb, except for a woman who looks away as if distracted in the pictured instant. She represents a princess of Naples who was the bride-to-be of Carlos IV’s son Ferdinand VII; her looks weren’t yet known in Spain. She faces a muddy painting, on the room’s back wall, that made reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. Some modern commentary detects, in her Lot’s-wife posture, a critical stab at the corruption of the monarchic state—as if no one at the time could have noticed it. And doesn’t Carlos IV look clownish? Your call. The more germane point is that he looks like—because he is—the King.
The tacit sensibilities of a given era tend to elude subsequent generations. I suspect that Goya’s sophisticated contemporaries found his occasional mischief chic. Tomlinson writes that to assign personal perspectives to Goya’s work for the court “is to impose values that are not of his time”—a familiar defense of historical figures who are judged harshly by present-day standards, but apt, as well, for an ill-fitting halo. When we presume agreement with Goya’s supposed politics, we drift afield of his extraordinary complexity. What it was like to be him crouches behind an ineffaceable question mark.