Agood 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.
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