Francisco Goya, The American Revolution, and the Fight ... · Francisco Goya, the American...

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20 Francisco Goya, the And the Fight Against The Synarchist Beast-Man A s in the case of Rabelais, entering the visual language of Francisco Goya takes an effort, something that has become increasingly difficult for the average Baby Boomer. By indicating some of the essential events of Goya’s period and life, I will try to provide you with some of the keys that will enable you to draw the geometry of his soul, and to harmonize the rhythm of your heart with his. Francisco Goya y Lucientes was born in 1746, and was 13 years old when Carlos III became King of Spain in 1759. Carlos, who was dedicated to the transformation of Spain out of Hapsburg backwardness through Colbertian policies of eco- nomic and scientific development, supported the American Revolution, and fought a pitched battle throughout his reign with the British Empire and reactionary elements within Spain, centered on the Jesuits, whom he expelled; the Spanish Inqui- sition, whose power he fought to restrict; and the landed feudal aristocracy, who opposed his eco- nomic reforms. 1 In the 1780’s, Goya was named Court Painter to King Carlos, whose revolutionary spirit he shared. When Carlos died in 1788, however, there was no strong successor, and the Inquisition moved quick- ly to reassert itself in the aftermath of the British- orchestrated French Revolution (1789). Despite this political reversal, Goya continued in his role as Court Painter to Carlos III’s succes- sors. He was appointed by Carlos IV in 1789, and then later, after the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 and the restoration of the Spanish Monar- chy in 1814, his appointment was reinstated by King Ferdinand VII. Fighting against despotism while simultaneous- ly holding a sensitive post as Painter in the service of the latter two kings—and, what’s more, stricken with total deafness at the age of 47 2 —Goya, like all resistance fighters, was well acquainted with the world of secrecy and deception. Initially treated as a mere talented craftsman, he would spend the first 17 years of his career painting the cartoons for tapestries with fancy bucolic themes, destined to brighten up the dining rooms of the Royals, not to mention some religious, bondieusard frescos in Venetian fashion. He took pleasure in observing the court from behind the scenes, but his ideals were simmering, and he care- fully filled his sketchbooks with “inventions,” visu- al notes for the development of ironical ideas. These sketchbooks would be the ever-flowing by Karel Vereycken Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2004 © 2004 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited.

Transcript of Francisco Goya, The American Revolution, and the Fight ... · Francisco Goya, the American...

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Francisco Goya, the American Revolution, And the Fight Against

The Synarchist Beast-Man

As in the case of Rabelais, entering thevisual language of Francisco Goya takesan effort, something that has become

increasingly difficult for the average BabyBoomer. By indicating some of the essential eventsof Goya’s period and life, I will try to provide youwith some of the keys that will enable you to drawthe geometry of his soul, and to harmonize therhythm of your heart with his.

Francisco Goya y Lucientes was born in 1746,and was 13 years old when Carlos III becameKing of Spain in 1759. Carlos, who was dedicatedto the transformation of Spain out of Hapsburgbackwardness through Colbertian policies of eco-nomic and scientific development, supported theAmerican Revolution, and fought a pitched battlethroughout his reign with the British Empire andreactionary elements within Spain, centered onthe Jesuits, whom he expelled; the Spanish Inqui-sition, whose power he fought to restrict; and thelanded feudal aristocracy, who opposed his eco-nomic reforms.1

In the 1780’s, Goya was named Court Painter toKing Carlos, whose revolutionary spirit he shared.When Carlos died in 1788, however, there was nostrong successor, and the Inquisition moved quick-

ly to reassert itself in the aftermath of the British-orchestrated French Revolution (1789).

Despite this political reversal, Goya continuedin his role as Court Painter to Carlos III’s succes-sors. He was appointed by Carlos IV in 1789, andthen later, after the Napoleonic invasion of Spainin 1808 and the restoration of the Spanish Monar-chy in 1814, his appointment was reinstated byKing Ferdinand VII.

Fighting against despotism while simultaneous-ly holding a sensitive post as Painter in the serviceof the latter two kings—and, what’s more, strickenwith total deafness at the age of 472—Goya, like allresistance fighters, was well acquainted with theworld of secrecy and deception.

Initially treated as a mere talented craftsman, hewould spend the first 17 years of his career paintingthe cartoons for tapestries with fancy bucolicthemes, destined to brighten up the dining roomsof the Royals, not to mention some religious,bondieusard frescos in Venetian fashion. He tookpleasure in observing the court from behind thescenes, but his ideals were simmering, and he care-fully filled his sketchbooks with “inventions,” visu-al notes for the development of ironical ideas.These sketchbooks would be the ever-flowing

by Karel Vereycken

Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2004

© 2004 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited.

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American Revolution, t

‘Goya, you deserve not only death, but the gallows.If we forgive you, it is because we admire you.’

King Ferdinand VII of Spain, 1814

FIGURE 1. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, “Self-Portrait,” 1815.Goya’s self-portrait at the age of 69, through its forward-leaning pose,creates a shocking contrast between an off-balance composition, andthe great determination speaking from the eyes, which invites us toshare his vision of freeing mankind from what he called “the commonprejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual.”

A WarningBy narrowing the perception of the work ofthe great artist Francisco Goya to a smallseries of paintings deemed to be mereillustrations of literary works dealing withwitchcraft, whose imagery pops up in the“Caprichos” and prevails in the “Pinturasnegras,” the Romantic counter-revolution hassucceeded in tarnishing the image of thispowerful revolutionary artist.

Goya’s social satire, driven by an Erasmiansense of irony that earned him the title “theSpanish Rabelais,” together with his profoundsense of the Sublime, have been systematicallypresented as the expression of a grotesque andbizarre art,3 as the monstrous fruit of a sickmind.4

Spain’s monarchist restoration of 1814, ofwhich Francoism5 is the most recent echo,willfully retarded serious research on the master.Lawfully, the core of fruitful research has beenachieved outside the sphere of Spain itself.

We are obviously dealing with the slandersby which the oligarchy denigrates the geniusesof mankind, especially when confronted by anartist lampooning the foundation of theoligarchy itself: the poison of mediocrity.

In brief: If Goya is an unknown artist witha well-known name, it is essentially the result ofa classic black propaganda campaign, identicalto those run against many others, notablyHieronymus Bosch and Edgar Allan Poe in thepast, or Lyndon LaRouche today.

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fountain of jokes, caricatures, paintings, andhundreds of engravings, most of whichwere not published during his lifetime.6

They were the groundwork for his socialand philosophical satire, the Caprichos (Fol-lies), a series of 80 etchings inspired by theart of cartooning, highly developed in Eng-land (Hogarth, Gilmore, et al.), and the“Scherzi” of Tiepolo, the Venetian rococomaster active in Spain.7 For example,beneath the drawing prepared for the sixthengraving of the series, Goya wrote: “Theworld is a masquerade: face, costume, andvoice, everything is false. All want to appearwhat they are not, all cheat and nobodyknows himself” [SEE Figure 2].

Goya invites himself to the masked ballof his day, but he is not duped by the fakenoses for which he is to become the itchingpowder. His work recalls Mozart’s contem-poraneous Don Giovanni: It mocks theclownishness of the fancy “petimetres”(from the French “petit-maître,” the fopsdressed in the Venetian fashion typical ofthe Court of Versailles), and reveals how,behind this giant Commedia del Arte ofgallant manners, there stand the brutalintrigues settled with slashing stiletto andlethal poison, so familiar to the degeneratenobility, let alone to those poor fellows who,perhaps even worse, tried to imitate them.

To end this vast Venetian Carnivale,Goya envisioned a society that dropped themasks, offering truth—often representedas a beautiful woman—to raise andenlighten the world with the light of itsreason, so that a different history formankind could be written [SEE Figure 3,and inside back cover, this issue].

February 6, 1799 was one of thesemoments. On that day, more than a decadeafter the death of Carlos III, Goya put onsale 300 sets (yes, that is 300380 prints, or atotal of 24,000 prints!) of the “Caprichos:universal language, drawn and engravedby Francisco de Goya,” as he wrote on thetitle page, although the printed versionwas to drop “universal language.” Thebooks were sold at the perfume shop belowGoya’s apartment, because no booksellerwas willing to risk doing so. That sameday, Goya announced the sale in the local

FIGURE 2. Francisco Goya yLucientes, Los Caprichos, Plate 6,“Nobody knows himself.”

FIGURE 3. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, “Allegory of the 1812 Constitution,” 1812-1814. The allegorical language employed here resembles that used at the time of theAmerican Revolution. At the center stands a handsome young woman, enlightened,

embodying the freedom of the Spanish nation. In her left hand she holds a small printedversion of the 1812 Constitution, while her right hand holds a little scepter. Her wrist isfirmly supported by an old bearded man (Time, with an hour-glass), whose giant wings

protect her from the darkness. In the foreground sits a young woman, all but naked,writing on a sheaf of paper: She is History, whose business is unveiled Truth.

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newspaper, the Diario de Madrid, with thefollowing advertisement:

The author is convinced that it is as properfor painting to criticize human error andvice, as for poetry and prose to do so,although criticism is usually taken to beexclusively the business of literature. Hehas selected from amongst the innumerablefoibles and follies to be found in any civilizedsociety, and from the common prejudices anddeceitful practices which custom, ignorance, orself-interest have made usual, those subjectswhich he feels to be the more suitablematerial for satire, and which, at the sametime, stimulate the artist’s imagination.

Since most of the subjects depicted inthis work are not real, it is not unreason-able to hope that connoisseurs will readilyoverlook their defects.

. . . The public is not so ignorant of theFine Arts, that it needs to be told that theauthor has intended no satire of the per-sonal defects of any specific individual inany of his compositions. Such specific satireimposes undue limitations on the artist’stalents, and also mistakes the way in whichperfection is to be achieved through imita-tion in art. [Emphasis added]

If we have some difficulty today in get-ting all the references in it, that was not thecase in Goya’s time. The tremendousimpact of the first 27 of the sets sold wasimmediate, and in response to threats from“la Santa” (Holy Inquisition),8 Goya feltobliged to halt the sale after barely ten days.

But Goya’s love for the beauty oftruth—even when it troubles or incitesyou—would be the heart of a long (82years), exceptionally productive life: over700 paintings, two cycles of large wall fres-cos, 900 drawings, and nearly 300 prints.

When, in 1824, at the age of 78, Goyaarrived in Bordeaux, France, he exploredand became a master of the new techniqueof lithography, giving us a drawing of aman walking with sticks, with the caption,“I’m still learning” [SEE Figure 4].

The GiantTo appreciate in a more direct way thepolitical and artistic genius of Goya, and toget a sense of his powerful sense of world-

historical identity, let’s look at the “Colos-sus” [SEE Figure 5, and front cover, thisissue], undoubtedly one of the most repre-sentative paintings of his outlook, whoseoriginal name was “The Giant.”9

Below a muscular giant who towers in asky filled with clouds bearing a thousandthunders, an indescribable hubbub capti-vates our eye. Herds of cattle break apart,horses throw their cavaliers to the ground,and caravans speed off in every direction.Lost in this eerie landscape, children cry,while women and men are on the run.Panic has taken over.

Most evidently, this drunken, blindblacksmith of hell incarnates none otherthan Napoleon Bonaparte, the “Beast-Man” placed in the saddle by greatfinancier interests to bring to a halt thewinds of republican enthusiasm blowingover the world, and to drown the Euro-pean continent in rivers of blood from nev-er-ending wars.

If the visionary Goya points to the evilto come, he does not show any sympathyfor those who—be they great or small—submit to the delusory “fatality” of events.When we look more closely at the paint-ing, we discover, slightly on the left in theforeground, a donkey, tranquilly satisfiedwith his own existence, and pretending to

FIGURE 4. Francisco Goya yLucientes, “I’m still learning,”Bordeaux Album, 1824-1828.Life expectancy in Eighteenth-century Spain ranged from 27to 32 years. Goya, at the age of78, nearly blind and living inexile in Bordeaux, France,joyfully learned the newtechnique of lithography.R

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be outside the torments of history [SEE

Figure 6].Although Renaissance humanists like

Brueghel traditionally represented Aris-toteleans as donkeys, the fact that theKing of Spain, Carlos III, in a publicevent, had called his son, the Prince ofAsturias and future King Carlos IV, “adonkey,” gives a particularly charmingtwist to the painting.

But beyond this anecdote, the animalexpresses here the stubborn “commonprejudices and deceitful practices whichcustom, ignorance, or self-interest havemade usual,” which Goya and his republi-can “ilustrado” friends wanted to take on.

“Donkeyness”—a state of emotionalblocking that is a caricature of animal-species fixedness—would joyfully bringlife, as a mirror for human stupidity, tomany “Caprichos,” where one sees, forinstance, who the real donkeys are: thosewho, with full consent, carry other don-keys on their backs [SEE Figure 7]. Theseare the “Leporellos” carrying the “DonGiovannis,” and without these servilevalets, no oligarch could manage to get hisbestial whims shoved down people’sthroats. No slave masters without slaves!

The American CenturyGoya’s century was a century whereenlightened elites, with BenjaminFranklin’s friendship societies as their

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FIGURE 5. Francisco Goya yLucientes, “Colossus,” 1808-1812. Europe’s Synarchistscreated Napoleon, to stop thespread of the ideas of theAmerican Revolution. Thispainting was done duringBonaparte’s bloody occupationof Spain.

FIGURE 7. FranciscoGoya y Lucientes, Los

Caprichos, Plate 42, “Thou who canst not.”

FIGURE 6. Francisco Goya y Lucientes,“Colossus” (detail).

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epicenter, were conspiring to convincethe peoples to throw off the yoke of abankrupt, moribund feudal system [SEE

Figure 8].While it is true that the British victory

in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) hadbrought about the domination of theAnglo-Venetian British Empire, it canalso be proven that what some called “therevenge” of the Franco-Spanish-ItalianBourbon family compact, offered the deci-sive help required to erect on the otherside of the Atlantic, an adversary repre-senting very quickly the only real chal-lenge to the British Empire: the AmericanRepublic.

Louis XVI (1754-1793) and his Spanishcousin Carlos III (1716-1788) each provid-ed the sum of a million pounds, in order tofacilitate an agent of the French secretintelligence service, Pierre Augustin Caronde Beaumarchais (1732-1793) [SEE Figure9],10 to create a fake trading company withthe name of “Rodrigue, Hortalez et Cie,”whose unique purpose was to channelmoney, credits, weapons, ammunition,uniforms, and engineers, together with animpressive number of experienced militarycommanders—including von Steuben,Lafayette, De Kalb, Bédaulx, Kosciusko,Pulaski, and so forth—to America, to

secure the ultimate victory of the insur-gents.11 For his part, Carlos III, in responseto a proposal by Benjamin Franklin,ordered military action by Bernardo deGálvez to seize Pensacola, Florida andMobile, Alabama from the British, and toexpel them from the Gulf of Mexico andthe banks of the Mississippi.

As the fruit of that several years’ long,nearly daily collaboration in Parisbetween the elder scientist Franklin andthe insolent French intelligence officerBeaumarchais, the American victorymade France appear in the eyes of theworld as the key center for world-liberatingrepublicanism.

That was the France that Goya and oth-er Spanish patriots loved. It would beagainst this France, and its sympathizers inSpain, that, after sabotaging the revolu-tionary process, the Congress of Viennawould impose, in 1815, on the ruins of theNapoleonic wars, the return of monarchi-cal absolutism: the restoration of LouisXVIII in France, and the despotic regimeof Ferdinand VII in Spain.

Because Goya was part of the Spanish“ilustrado” faction—he was, in fact, aspokesman and sort of cultural ambas-sador for it—it is not surprising to see himbeing directly attacked by the evil Count

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FIGURE 9. Jean-MarcNattier, “Portrait ofBeaumarchais,” 1755.

FIGURE 8. Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, whospearheaded the international movment toestablish republican government.

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Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) [SEE Figure10], one of the conceptual architects ofmodern Synarchism, a counter-revolution-ary project designed to eradicate republi-canism from the globe. De Maistre, theman who fathered the conception of the“Beast-Man,” as he developed it in hisdescription of the executioner—this apolo-gist for human sacrifice and passionateadmirer of the Inquisition—struck out atGoya’s Caprichos, remarking that a book ofEnglish-style caricatures, published inMadrid, had passed through his hands, inwhich “one ridicules the Queen in themost forceful manner possible, and theallegory is so transparent that even a childcould see it.”12

Goya, according to his friends, com-pared painting to bullfighting. A beautifulself-portrait shows the master with paletteand brushes in front of an easel [SEE Figure11]. He wears a bullfighter’s jacket and ahat equipped with candleholders, aninvention of Leonardo da Vinci thatallegedly was used by Michelangelo towork at night.

But the bull of Goya “the toreador,”was not a physical one—it was mental. Itwas the concept of the Synarchist Beast-Man that he wanted to hunt down in thearena!

Goya and the ‘Ilustrados’Goya was born in 1746, the son of agilder who worked in Saragossa, the cap-ital of Aragon. Although the young Car-los had been king of the two Sicilies(Naples and Sicily) beginning 1734, hebecame Carlos III of Spain in 1759. Nowin power in Spain, Carlos introduced eco-nomic and education reforms to promotethe General Welfare of the Spanish peo-ple, in opposition to the interests of thefeudal oligarchy and its Inquisition. Toaccomplish this revolutionary purpose, heselected as his advisors a number of keyindividuals, some Italian and French andothers Spanish, who were in the intellec-tual tradition of Jean Baptiste Colbertand G.W. Leibniz.

The central figure of this history was

FIGURE 10. Karl Vogel vonVogelstein, “Portrait of Joseph

de Maistre,” c. 1810.

FIGURE 11. Francisco Goyay Lucientes, “Self-Portraitin the Studio” 1794-1795.Goya liked this window,because it had special frostedglass that allowed in brightbut diffused light.

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Pedro Rodriguez de Campomanes, theleading figure of the Spanish current ofphysical economy and organizer of therenowned “soirées of Campomanes,” ren-dezvous obligé where many Spanish“ilustrados,” including Goya as early as1780,13 entered into a kind of permanentdialogue.

Here, one found in attendance:

• Pedro Rodriguez de Campomanes(1723-1803) [SEE Figure 12]: Economist, lit-erateur, and a precocious Hellenist, hespoke Greek, Latin, and Arabic. As anadolescent, he went out to teach literatureto poor children. Awarded a law degree atthe age of 19, he would be admitted to theAcademy of History, and would laterreform the Spanish postal services. CarlosIII, who realized that Spain needed areformer, was impressed by his knowl-edge, his eloquence, and his talents as anadministrator, and nominated him to be“fiscal of the Council of Castile” (FinanceMinistry) in 1763, a post he would hold formore than 20 years. As reported by onebiographer: “Campomanes immediatelyattacked the abuses that were ruining thecountry. By adroit measures, he reducedthe number of monks, suppressed a greatnumber of monasteries that lacked suffi-cient income and whose members couldnot live except through beggary, andincreased the inadequate stipend of manypriests, while simultaneously demandingfrom them more instruction andmorality.”14

On the model of the Real SociedadBacongada de los Amigos del Pais(Basque Royal Society of the Friends ofthe Country), Campomanes foundedsimilar societies in Madrid in 1775 [SEE

Figure 13], and in numerous otherregions of Spain. He developed the uni-versity curricula, focussing on mathemat-ics, physics, the natural sciences, and lan-guages, which were until then neglected.After Carlos III expelled the Jesuits fromSpain in 1767, Campomanes had thebooks included amongst their possessionsdistributed to the libraries of the king-dom, and later opened the library of the

Imperial College, later San IsidroLibrary. Benjamin Franklin made him amember of the Philosophical Society ofPhiladelphia.

Campomanes listened carefully tofarmers, entrepreneurs, and craftsmen,and opened government posts for them,which until then had been limited to thenobility. One day, he declared, not with-out humor, that the sewing needle was“more important than all the syllogisms ofAristotle”!

• Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos (1744-1811) [SEE Figure 14]: Inspired by Campo-manes, this poet, economist, and statesman

FIGURE 12. AntonioRaphael Mengs, “Don PedroRodriguez, Conde deCampomanes.”Campomanes organized amovement of intellecturalsto free Spain from the grip offeudalism, establishing anetwork of Leibnizianscientific societiesthroughout the country.

FIGURE 13. Entrance to theReal Sociedad de Amigos delPais, Madrid.

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would become the most important andnoble figure of the “ilustrados,” and a per-sonal friend of Goya. As BenjaminFranklin did at Versailles, he provoked ascandal by appearing in court without hislawyer’s wig, which tells you somethingabout that century. In opposition to theInquisition and the Jesuits, he demandedthat higher education be conducted in thevernacular, not Latin. He called for theelimination of torture. Falsely accused ofbeing a follower of the Enlightenmentatheist Voltaire, this Catholic stated that hisspiritual brother was Thomas à Kempis,the author of the Imitation of the Christ andone of the founders of the Brothers of theCommon Life, the teaching order thattrained Nicolaus of Cusa and Erasmus ofRotterdam. In 1797, Emmanuel de Godoy,the favorite of Queen Maria-Luisa of Par-ma, nominated him to be Minister of Jus-tice and Religion. Under extreme pressurefrom the Inquisition, Jovellanos was exiledin 1801, to rot away in prison in Majorca,deprived of pen, ink, and paper. Onlywhen the French invaded Spain in 1808,would he be set free, to become the émi-nence grise of the Junta Central of the Span-ish patriots’ resistance based in Seville.

• José Monino, Count of Floridablanca(1728-1808) [SEE Figure 15]. Originally amodest lawmaker, he became the principalminister of Carlos III. He sent money tothe American revolutionaries. He was par-ticularly committed to creating and mod-ernizing, through great public works, theeconomic infrastructure that had oncebeen so advanced under the Arab caliphsof Andalusia. He worked closely withRamon de Pignatelli (1734-1793), thecanon of the Cathedral of Zaragoza, whohad protected the young Goya during hisearly education. Co-founder of theAragonese Economic Society of theFriends of the Country, it was Pignatelliwho, in a manner similar to Franklin Roo-sevelt’s TVA in the Twentieth century, cre-ated a development corridor, bringingcommunication and irrigation to Aragonby building a gigantic canal linking theAtlantic to the Mediterranean.

FIGURE 14. Francisco Goya y Lucientes,“Gaspar de Jovellanos,” 1797-1798.

FIGURE 15. Portrait ofJosé Monino, Count ofFloridablanca (detail). King Carlos III, on hisdeathbed, had only onerequest of the incoming

King—that he keepFloridablanca as Prime

Minister.

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• Francisco (François) de Cabarrus(1752-1810) [SEE Figure 16] was a politicaleconomist and financier of French extrac-tion, born in Bayonne. In 1783, with thesupport of Carlos III’s finance ministerMiguel de Muzquiz (1719-1785) andFloridablanca, he created the Banco de SanCarlos, a state credit institution, seven yearsbefore Alexander Hamilton created thefirst National Bank of the United States onthe same principles. The capital of the bankcame mainly from Spanish, but also fromDutch and French sources.15 Goya himselfwas a shareholder, and did portraits of mostof the bank’s directors.16 Cabarrus’s secre-tary was Léandro Fernandez de Moratin(1760-1828) [SEE Figure 17], a poet, drama-tist, and intimate friend of Goya, who, likehim, died in exile in France.

In addition, there were other individualsclose to Goya who were connected to orresponsible for the Economic Societies ofthe Friends of the Country, including Mar-tin Zapater (1746-1803) and one of his pro-tectors, the Duchess of Osuna (1752-1834).17

Although most of these individualswould react in different ways to the earth-shaking political crisis that erupted withthe fall of the Bourbons in France, therewas an early, far-reaching consensus con-cerning the nature of the economic depres-sion, and the remedies to be mobilized.Here are the essentials18:

1. On the social and economic level,Spain had “lost two centuries,” the dramaticconsequence of the expulsion of the Jews(commerce) and the Moors (craftsmen) byTorquemada’s Inquisition, which tragicallyaborted the potential of Queen Isabella theCatholic to transform Spain into a sovereignnation-state along the lines of the France ofher protector Louis XI. In Goya’s time, alarge part of the Spanish population (clergy,nobility, hidalgos, army, etc.) occupied itselfin non-productive activities. Spain had200,000 monks, nuns, and priests—twicethe number of Italy, and three times that ofFrance. Moreover, there were 500,000noblemen, more than France, whose popu-lation was twice that of Spain. According tothe social criteria of the country, the nobility

FIGURE 17. Francisco Goyay Lucientes, “Portrait ofLéandro Fernandez deMoratin,” 1799. Along withJovellanos, Moratin helpedGoya develop ideas for the“Caprichos.”

FIGURE 16. Francisco Goya yLucientes, “Portrait ofFrancisco de Cabarrus,” 1788.

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and the hidalgos (impoverished nobility, ofwhom Don Quixote is a caricature), wereforbidden to work, on pain of renouncingtheir titles! But, since the country lacked aneffective middle class of independent entre-preneurs, merchants, and craftsmen, thetime had come to reestablish the valuesassociated with production, by puttingeverybody to work. War on idleness!

2. Campomanes’s outlook was a combi-nation of Colbertian voluntarism (protec-tionism, manufacturing, and infrastructuredevelopment), Leibnizian scientific mobi-lization (Academy of Sciences), land reformas envisioned by Thomas More in his Utopia(redistribution of idle land, favor grain pro-duction over sheep raising), and philosophi-cal optimism about human nature (educa-

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Goya lived at a time when thelate rococo style was being

superseded by the new, neo-classicalfashion outlined by the German the-oretician Johann Joachim Winckel-mann (1717-1768). In his “Reflec-tions on the Imitation of the Greeksin Sculpture and Painting” (1755),Winkelmann defined the self-con-tradictory task that resulted fromthe fact that “the only means wehave at our disposal to gain great-ness, even to become inimitable(unnachahmlich), is through theimitation (nachahmung) of theancients,” for which he praisedRaphael, Michelangelo, and Poussin.

Winkelmann’s collaborator inRome, with the now nearly forgot-ten name of Anton Raphael Mengs(1728-1779), was at that time con-sidered the greatest genius of alltime, and was invited by Carlos IIIto Spain to become painter to hisCourt. Failure to admire him wasconsidered an attack against Stateand Church, and Mengs ruled as adictator at the Royal Academy ofMadrid, where he imposed strictacademic training based exclusivelyon the imitation of Greek sculpture,which was supposedly the secret ofthe artists Raphael, Correggio, andTitian.

As a spokesman for those who

opposed the cold, neo-classical“Empire” style that Napoleonwould later make mandatory inFrance and the countries he occu-pied,* Goya repeatedly claimed thathis three masters were “Nature,Velazquez, and Rembrandt.”

Here Goya echoed Leonardo daVinci’s precept on imitation,

no painter should imitate the man-ner of another painter, since thatwould make him merely thenephew and not the son of nature,

and his advice on how to trainpainters,

The youth should first learn per-spective. Then he may copy fromsome good master, to accustomhimself to fine forms. Then fromnature, to confirm by practice therules he has learnt. Then see for atime the works of various masters.Then getting the habit of puttinghis art into practice and work.[Ash. I, 18a]

So, for Goya, as for Velazquez,whose paintings he copied in a seriesof etchings in 1778, and also forRembrandt, whose sketches he stud-ied in Saragossa even before goingto study in Rome, nature had to beimitated, not as a template, but as anintention that appeared throughwhat Goya called the “magic of theambience.” There is no recipe for atrue creative exchange between theartist and nature. All the rest is the“oppression” of “tired styles” thatleads to “nothing good in painting.”

In 1792, 13 years after Mengs’death, in a report to the RoyalAcademy on the subject of teachingart, Goya wrote:

What a scandal to hear naturedepreciated in comparison toGreek statues, by one who knowsneither one nor the other withoutacknowledging that the smallestpart of nature confounds andamazes those who know most!What statue or cast might there be,that is not copied from divinenature? As excellent as the artistmay be who copied it, can he notbut proclaim that when placed at

Goya’s Paintings: Imitate Life By Forms, Not Lines

Anton Raphael Mengs, “Self-Portrait,”1778-1779.

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tion, equitable justice, personal freedom,and abolition of the Inquisition).

3. As early as 1771, and after a longinquiry, Campomanes and Floridablancaproposed, in the name of the “GeneralInterest” (Common Good), to redistributeidle farmland belonging to the nobility andthe religious orders. People from Germany

and France were encouraged to emigrateto Spain, to repopulate entire regions thathad become depopulated. Taxes unjustlycrushing the lower classes were progres-sively transferred to the aristocracy and theclergy, who were until then free of anyform of imposition. As in France, theseurgent land reforms, and the demand ofjust fiscal treatment, were some of the key

its side, one is the work ofGod, and the other of ourmiserable hands? He whowishes to distance himself,to correct [nature] withoutseeking the best of it, can hehelp but fall into a repre-hensible and monotonousmanner, of paintings, ofplaster models? . . .

. . . [T]here are no rulesin painting, and . . . theoppression, or servile oblig-ation, of making all studyfollow the same path, is agreat impediment for theyoung who profess this verydifficult art that approachesthe divine more than theother.

An early biography recallsa conversation overheardwhen the old Goya was inexile in Bordeaux, claimingthat what the academicswanted and encouraged in theiryoung charges, was the abstractionof “always lines, never forms.”

Any painter working throughlarge fresco cycles has been forcedto overcome this paradox. Howmany lines of a fresco decoratingthe inside of a cupola, do you still

see while standing far below on theground? Goya here intelligentlyassimilated the great breakthroughsof Leonardo, Caravaggio, de laTour, and Rembrandt, contribu-tions that appear in Velazquez’searly illusionistic style, based ondramatic lightning, strong model-

ling, and sharp contrast.So, Goya continued:

Where do they find these lines innature? Personally, I see onlyforms that are lit up and formsthat are not, planes that advanceand planes that recede, relief anddepth. My eye never sees outlinesof particular features or details. Ido not count the hairs in the beardof the man who passes by anymore than the buttonholes on hisjacket attract my notice. My brushshould not see better than I do.

That creative, “modern” insight,based on freedom rather than for-mal rules, made aquatint etching afar more attractive medium forGoya than simple line etching,where tones can only be generatedby increasingly dense hatchedlines.

As Caprichos, Plate 32 (“Becauseshe was susceptible”), demonstrates:If Goya didn’t feel the need to uselines, he simply left them out,allowing the subject matter todefine the technical means ofexpression, and not the other wayaround!

—KV

Caprichos, Plate 32, “Because she wassusceptible.”

__________

* By a monumental use of sober decorativepatterns derived from the ancients, the“Empire” style would revive the cold aesthet-ics of Spartan and Roman civilization. At thesuggestion of his wife Joséphine de Beauhar-nais (whose boudoir still survives intact asthe essence of the “Style Empire,” incidental-ly), Napoleon favored the architects Charles

Percier and Pierre-François Fontaine. Theirstandardized style of “archeological neo-classicism” gave birth not only to palaces inFrance (such as Fontainebleau, Compiègne,Rambouillet, and the Elysée), but wasimposed on the subjugated countries(Turin, Florence, Laeken, Antwerp, Am-sterdam, Utrecht, Haarlem, Aranjuez, etc.).

While in sculpture this style is identifiedwith the works of Antonio Canova (1757-1822), whose works blend frigidity withvoluptuous pleasure, and grace with lan-guor, the realistic paintings of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) display the fascis-tic, pessimistic rationalism so typical of theRoman grandeur cherished by Napoleon.

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questions to be solved to enable society toprogress.

4. As a consequence, all Spaniards wereencouraged to educate themselves, and tohave a productive life, which is the glue ofthe social cohesion of the nation. To cyclethe nobility into something productive,Campomanes encouraged them to getmaterially and actively involved in scientif-ic research, through the creation of labora-tories, centers intended to become open toall. He created jobs for the military,vagabonds, beggars, and prisoners. Indus-tries that created jobs for women were inparticular supported. The Inquisition,whose powers were sharply reduced, wasasked to fight heresy with education, notwith repression.

As would be expected, such far-reach-ing humanistic reforms provoked “struc-tural” opposition, in particular from thenobility and the clergy, a real ancien régime,whose power and privileges were directlychallenged by the new policy. The hardcore of that resistance to progress was theSpanish Inquisition, and as such it becamethe legitimate target of the Christianhumanism of Goya and his friends [SEE

Appendix, page 44].

The Spanish InquisitionThe Inquisition was first called for in 1213by Pope Innocent III, and instituted byPope Gregory IX in 1231 to fight theCathar heresy, and witchcraft in general. In

Nowadays, Goya, if not called aRomantic, is often—and

wrongly—identified as the founderor precursor of modernism, surreal-ism, impressionism, and the othermodern “-isms.” Proof is providedby the out-of-context presentationof his quote that “there are no rulesin painting” [SEE Box, page 30].Even those academics who havetried to counter this, have classifiedhim as a “late Spanish rococo”painter, since he definitely is light-years away from the rising neo-clas-sicist style of his time (e.g., Mengs,Winckelmann).

Let us begin by recalling LyndonLaRouche’s definition of Classicalart, as opposed to what is taught inpresent-day textbooks, which in gen-eral propagate the myth that it waswhat is called academic “classi-cism”—supposedly the eternal imita-tion of the cold canons of proportiondiscovered by the “pure” Greeks, and

standardized by the prag-matic Romans—that wasthe outcome of Europe’sFifteenth and Sixteenthcenturies’ Golden Renais-sance. LaRouche, answer-ing a question at an Inter-national Cadre School inMay 2003, said:

Classical art is notsomething that some-body invented. Classi-cal art is actually a sortof secretion of thehuman being, a natur-al secretion. Any para-dox in life, whether aparadox of sense per-ception—where you find that, insome moment, things don’t workthe way you would have thoughtthey would from habit, and yourealize there’s something outthere, besides what your sense per-ception tells you. At that point,you suddenly have a sense of

irony—metaphor, or irony. Now,the most important experiences inlife are of this type: Things thatevoke a sense of irony andmetaphor, that the world is notwhat habit instructs you to believeit was. That’s the message youfind important to communicate.

Why Goya Is a Great ClassicalArtist

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1478, the Dominican monk Tomás deTorquemada (1420-1498), the Queen’s con-fessor, convinced Isabella and Ferdinand toestablish the emergency laws instituting themedieval Inquisition in Spain. Torquema-da became the all-powerful Grand Inquisi-tor who executed heretics and blasphemers.But his main quarry were the atheists, theconverted Jews (“conversos” or “marra-nos,” the latter word meaning “pigs”),19

and the Moors (“moriscos”). On his person-al account: nearly 100,000 trials, 8,800 exe-cutions at the stake, 90,000 condemnedto diverse forms of repentance, and over1 million people who fled the country!

The Inquisition continued after Torque-mada’s death; in Spain alone, between 1481and 1808, some 35,000 people were burned

at the stake [SEE Figure 18]. The insatiablecupidity of the Spanish clergy, dominatedby the mendicant orders, led to the arrest ofthe Jews and the confiscation of their mon-ey, goods, and belongings, as had been thecase earlier in the fight against the Cathars.Fighting heresy and witchcraft became themost profitable business on Earth!

On March 31, 1492, the Jews wereexpelled from the kingdom of Spain, andthe Inquisition equally attacked convertedMoors and mystics, the label “allumbrados”(illuminati) being universally applied to allthose who minimized the importance ofthe Catholic rites. Later, the target wouldbecome the followers of the Protestant orErasmian reform movement, labelled with-out distinction “lutheranos.”

These things are called ideas—genuine ideas; artistic ideas.

So, man tries to develop ways ofcommunicating things which obvi-ously are important to society, andto the individual, and to others.Out of this comes art. It comes inthe form of Classical poetry, whichis an evolution of a combination ofthe natural qualities of the humanspeaking/singing voice, which hasnatural peculiarities, which areused, as a way of communicating,in composing poetry. This is true inmusic. It’s true also in painting,great painting, great art.

Goya clearly opposed both theidea that art is a mere formal repre-sentation or imitation of pleasing,even beautiful, forms and colors(“mannerism”), and also the bar-baric fantasy that one can sacrificethe visual domain, for the sake ofthe pseudo-spontaneous exterior-ization of some emotion or other(“Romanticism,” “modernism”).

His art, through the use of para-doxical metaphors, energizes thosespecific creative powers of the mindLaRouche identifies. By making

images of the preconscious availableto conscious thought processes, andby making these ironies subjects of“truthful human communication ofideas, true or false” (LaRouche),man, through a social process, isfreed of the slavery of “the commonprejudices and deceitful practiceswhich custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual,” as Goyastated in his advertisement for theCaprichos. That uplifting (sublime)experience, powerfully increasesman’s willful mastery of thedomain of self-conscious creativity,a quality that defines precisely thedifference between creative manand the lower species.

Aware that pretty appearancescan hide the ugliness of intentions,Goya seems to share the vision ofthe poet John Keats (1795-1821),who wrote in his “Ode on a Gre-cian Urn” that, “Beauty is truth,truth beauty, —that is all / Ye knowon earth, and all ye need to know.”In that sense, Goya’s art is often nei-ther pretty nor pleasing, but Classi-cally and truly beautiful, preciselyfor its truthfulness. —KV

Goya was deeply inspired by Rembrandt’sgreat art of the portrait. Superseding thesuperficial, “physical” splendor of neo-classical perfection, exemplified here bythe court painter Anton RaphaelMengs’ portrait of Princess Maria-Luisa of Parma (1765) (left), Goya’slove for truth and mankind enabledhim to paint in the mind of the viewer adifferent kind of beauty, an “inner,moral (i.e., creative) beauty,” reflectingthe living substance of a person’s soul.His portrait of the young actressAntonia Zárate (1811), shown above,demonstrates this unique quality ofRembrandtian “interiority.”

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Around 1480, Spain reached the highestdegree of symbolic unity between Churchand State, by consecrating the cult of“limpieza de sangre” (purity of the blood),somewhat akin to the Nazis of a later per-iod.20 Henceforth, the Inquisition, being pros-ecutor, judge, and jury all rolled into one,

would make rulings on these two issues:purity of blood, and loyalty to the Church.

Although torture was formally prohibit-ed as a form of execution, it was considerednecessary to obtain information and confes-sions. Besides many other public humilia-tions, the three most common methods oftorture were the “garrucha” (strangulation),“la toca” (shoving a piece of wet cloth downthe throat, to create the effect of drowning),and the “potro” (tightening ropes aroundthe body). But, in Goya’s time, most victimswere executed by strangulation in public, amethod wrongly supposed to be less painfulthan burning at the stake [SEE Figure 19].Goya left us several drawings and paintingsdescribing the sinister human sacrificesorganized by “the Santa” (Holy Tribunal) aspopular entertainment, which they used asa means of ruling over the masses withdeath, fire, and terror, while at the sametime encouraging debauchery and supersti-tion in secret. The systematic denunciations,fuelled by sheer cupidity, would plungeSpain into a permanent climate of mutualsuspicion, and would ruin the spirit of sci-entific inquiry and create a definite distrustof progress. The atrocities of the civil warsthat ravaged Spain later, as well as the bru-tal massacres of native populations in theAmericas, have their origins here.

FIGURE 19. Francisco Goya yLucientes, “El agarrotado”(“The Garrotted Man”),etching, c. 1779. TheInquisition burned 35,000people at the stake, andtortured or punished 90,000more.

FIGURE 18. Auto-da-fé of1680 on the Plaza Mayor ofMadrid. The last greatdemonstration of the power ofthe Inquisition was thisimmense “auto-da-fé.” Toopen a celebration of hiswedding, King Carlos IIpersonally lit the stakes of 27“judaizers” (converts suspectedof secretly practicing Judaism).

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Schiller’s play Don Carlos, completed in1787—the year the United States adoptedits beautiful Constitution, and the yearGoya tried to learn some French—con-tained a forceful message for Spain: Unlessyou take on the Inquisition, your countryis doomed. Carlos III, who as early as 1737had invited the Jews (who had beenexpelled by Emperor Charles V) to returnto the Kingdom of Naples, and had pre-vented the establishment of an Inquisitionin that kingdom, had later, as King ofSpain, expelled the Jesuits from both Spainand New Spain, and severely restricted thepower of the Inquisition. But he did nothave the political power to abolish it.When Carlos IV succeeded his father in1788, the Franco-Spanish pressure cookerwas about to explode. In Spain, the Inqui-sition began to reassert its power inalliance with the British, who wouldorchestrate both the anti-republican Revo-lution in France, and its later NapoleonicSynarchist reaction.

The Shock of 1789Carlos IV, a donkey in the center of histori-cal torment, decided that hunting was farmore interesting than ruling, and left thedaily management of state affairs to hiswife, Maria-Luisa of Bourbon Parma (1765-1819) [SEE Figure 20, and inside back cover,this issue]. A superficial spouse, Maria-Luisa hated her despicable son, the futureFerdinand VII (1784-1833), and took herfavorite, her young bodyguard Emmanuelde Godoy (1767-1851), to run the country[SEE Figure 21]; in 1792, Carlos IV appoint-ed Godoy Prime Minister.

The reform movement created by Car-los III, which had been given institutionalexpression, was still sufficiently strong afternearly 30 years of rule by Carlos III, that itcould not be fully broken initially. Carloshad taken care to stipulate the policieswhich his successors should implement, ina 1787 “Confidential Memorandum” to theState Council drafted for him by Florida-blanca. Although Maria-Luisa and Godoywere both instruments of the Inquisitionafter the French Revolution, which target-

ted the pro-American intellectual elite inthat country for execution or imprison-ment, they did not yet have the power todestroy the pro-American elite in Spain.

Thus, even though Godoy was theirenemy, he was forced initially to continueto defend Campomanes’ “Friends of theCountry” societies, to encourage the indus-trialization of Spain, and to upgrade basiceducation, including the introduction ofthe advanced pedagogical model of theSwiss Johann Pestalozzi (1746-1827), a col-laborator of Wilhelm von Humboldt.21

Godoy commissioned Goya, who wasthe Court Painter, to paint four tondos,depicting allegories of the economic values

FIGURE 20. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, “Family of Carlos IV,” 1800. Goyademonstrates in this vast canvas all the science he had learned from the great masters.From Velazquez’s “Meninas,” he takes the “mirror” effect: all the figures, andespecially Queen Maria-Luisa, who is standing at the geometrical center of thecomposition (and the monarchy), are posing as if admiring themselves in front of amirror. And, as Velazquez did in his painting, Goya also includes himself, in the left,shadowy part of the wide canvas, standing behind the royals. As in Rembrandt’s“Night Watch,” and violating every formal rule of “classicism,” Goya dares to presenta figure clothed in black (King Carlos IV) at the very front. While their degeneratenature speaks for itself today, the royals were immensely charmed with these truthfulrepresentations. Blinded by their own vanity, they saw only the glittering garments ofthe Queen, and the triumph of royal decorum. Belonging to the oligarchical casteprevented them from seeing the evident moral ugliness of their own appearance, or thepowerful shadow that creeps in from the left and announces their coming doom.Hence, Goya indeed immortalized their foolish mortality.

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defended by Campomanes and Jovellanos:Commerce, Agriculture, Science, andIndustry [SEE Figure 22].

Maria-Luisa became increasingly thepuppet of the Inquisition, which was out toturn her against Floridablanca, Cabarrus,and Jovellanos. In 1789, Maria-Luisa, pan-icked by the events in France—whereLouis XVI, after the storming of theBastille, made it known he might takerefuge in Spain with his first cousin—

wants to stop “the ideas” of the Revolution.The Inquisition is reinforced, and redou-bles its efforts. Floridablanca, unable toconceive of a creative solution, installs aferocious censorship. Not a word appearsin the Spanish press on the events that areshaking up France. It never happened. Ifwe don’t talk about it, it might disappearon its own. Alas, too late! Unable to stop“the ideas,” one arrests those who thinkthem. It must be these damn “ilustrados”!

On June 25, 1790, for no stated reason,François Cabarrus, one of the mastermindsof the Banco de San Carlos, is arrested andthrown in jail. Campomanes refuses todefend him. Jovellanos is advised to leaveMadrid and go study “the extraction ofcoal in the Asturias”; Goya, without hav-ing requested it, receives a pass to go and“breathe the maritime air of Valencia.”

Then, in 1792, a “U-turn”: After thearrest of Louis XVI, war between Franceand Spain seems inevitable. The accelerationof history traps the humanists in a pincersmovement. The fates of France and Spainare inextricably linked together. Either someform of revolution becomes successful, or itwill bring about the loss of everything.Godoy manipulates the “ilustrados,” whoare being accused of being agents of a for-eign power, “afrancesados” (“Frenchies”).Cabarrus is called upon and sent to France,where he pleads in defense of Louis XVI.According to some, his secret mission is tospirit the French king out of the country.

On Jan. 21, 1793, Louis XVI’s head fallsinto the basket of the guillotine. Carlos IV,in a surreal act, declares war on France, andFrance declares war on Spain. This is whenGoya might have been poisoned, or gottenthe wrong medical treatment, and he leavesMadrid to live with friends in Cadiz. Thedaughter of Cabarrus, Teresa, is the wife ofthe Frenchman Tallien, one of the organizersof Thermidor, the attempted counter-coupthat would send Robespierre to the guillotine.

Godoy arranges a peace agreement withFrance. The Spanish Bourbons are allowedto stay on the throne, but “ilustrados” Jovel-lanos and Francisco de Saavedra (1746-1819)are put in as ministers. Within months, theInquisition, that meeting place of clergy and

FIGURE 21. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, “Emmanuel de Godoy,” 1801. The Queen’syoung bodyguard, Godoy was promoted to take over the reins of goverment. Knownfor his sexual escapades, Godoy betrayed the humanists on behalf of the Inquisition. Inthis portrait, painted the same year Godoy was given the title of Generalissimo of theArmies on Land and Sea, Goya suggests where Godoy’s real power lay—in the wordsof one biographer, “between [Godoy’s] mighty thighs, a walking stick with a knobbyhandle stands erect.” In the immediate background, Goya juxtaposes a horse’s ass tothe seated Godoy.

FIGURE 22. Francisco Goya yLucientes, “Allegory ofIndustry,” 1797-1800.

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nobility, orders them out. For Goya, thatcapitulation is the equivalent of treason, andhe counter-attacks by tearing off the masks.

‘Los Caprichos: UniversalLanguage’We now know enough of the political andeconomic context, to bring in Goya as hestarts lobbing shells into the headquartersof the enemy general staff.

Los Caprichos: idioma universal will becomposed as a Socratic dialogue of thesame type as Erasmus’s Colloquies [SEE Fig-ure 23, selected Plates]. Beneath the surfaceof every one of these little histories, there isa well-directed, delicious irony, lampoon-ing very precise political figures, who wereotherwise unassailable.22 But the primarytarget of Goya’s attack was not the royalsper se, but rather the false axiomaticassumptions of the popular culture, whichsustained their oligarchical misrule. In theCaprichos, Goya takes social commentaryto new heights, where human figures aredistorted by appetites and passions; heexposes the sources of folly, but is confidentthat mankind can rise above them.

Plate 4, “Nanny’s boy,” is probably aportrayal of Queen Maria-Luisa, who wasknown for an incessant struggle to master

her maladjusted false teeth. A laborer pullsa weight towards the right, while the brat,hands in mouth, blocks his passage.

Plate 5, “Two of a kind” (“What resem-bles, assembles”): Marriage for mutualbenefit: is this Godoy and the Queen?

Plate 8: A tragic philosophical realityintervenes: “They carried her off!” Twophantomlike figures—clergymen, ornoblemen?—carry off a young woman,destroying the future.

FIGURE 23. Francisco Goya yLucientes, Los Caprichos,Plate 4, “Nanny’s boy.”

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 5,“Two of a kind” (“Whatresembles, assembles”).

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 8,“They carried her off!”

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To understand how the power of ideasinhabits this fantasy world of social andpolitical satire, it is indispensable to be ableto compare the captions and legends on theoriginal drawings, drawn directly fromGoya’s hand and mind, with the ones thatappear on the final engravings, which hesoftened and made purposely obscure, inan act of self-censorship probably suggest-ed by friends (Jovellanos, Moratin) who

were concerned to avoid more trouble forGoya, who was clearly playing withmatches on the pyre.

Take, as an example, Plate 13, showingmonks eating a hot dinner with spoons. Onthe engraved version it reads “They arehot.” But, on the original drawing, thehandwritten text is far more explicit: “Hereare the men who are devouring us” (antici-pating the theme of “Saturn devouring one

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 13,“They are hot.”

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 79,“No one has seen us.”

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 80,“It’s time.”

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 43,“The sleep of reason producesmonsters.”

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of his sons”). We find these monks feastingagain in Plate 79, “No one has seen us,” andalso at the very end of the series, Plate 80,where they are hysterically screaming, andit says, “It’s time.” The famous print, “Thesleep of reason produces monsters,” (nowPlate 43, approximately half way throughthe series, introducing the theme of super-stition taking over if reason falls asleep),was initially conceived as Plate 1, the open-ing statement, and would have made clearthe full significance of the last plate, i.e.,“ ‘It’s time’ for Reason to wake up!”

One of the monsters that pops up oftenin the Caprichos is the owl. In Spanish popu-lar culture at the time of Goya, as it was inFlanders during Hieronymus Bosch’s life-time, this bird of night was a metaphor forsin, able to see and operate in darkness.Also, in the very common practice of birdhunting, an owl was attached with a littlestring to a tree. The owl’s screeching attract-ed other birds, who then fell in the nets orgot stuck on the branches of the tree cov-ered with glue by the hunter. Plate 19, “Allwill fall,” shows that stratagem, with a bird-woman as the bait on the tree, and the man-birds being castrated in the foreground.

With Plate 55, we’re back at the royalpalace: “Until death” features Maria-Luisa,flaccid and withered, trying desperately to

restore her looks with make-up in front of amirror (a theme developed in the painting,“Time and the Old Ladies” [SEE Figure 24,and inside back cover, this issue]).

The most explicitly political cartoon ofthe series is without doubt Plate 56, “Torise and to fall.” In addition to the title’sreference to Godoy’s sexual performances,one sees him being lifted up by a giantsatyr (bestial force). Godoy is depicted with

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 55,“Until death.”

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 19,“All will fall.”

FIGURE 23. Caprichos, Plate 56,“To rise and to fall.”

flames and smoke—an image of the Inqui-sition—pouring forth from his head, andin his rise, two figures are thrown aside:Jovellanos and Saavedra, the two “ilustra-dos” he threw out of the government.

The theme of marriage for convenience,status, or money appears in a satiricalpoem by Jovellanos, “A Arnesto,”

Without invoking reason, nor weighingIn their hearts the merits of the groom,They say yes and give their handTo the first comer,

which opens the Caprichos [SEE Figure 23,Plate 2], and will be treated in prose inMoratin’s masterpiece, the “Si de las ninas”of 1806, which was banned by the Inquisi-tion. Without ignoring macho behavior,Goya goes after the tradition of Spanishwomen’s self-degrading behavior as sexobjects, often encouraged by their mothersacting as bawds or procuresses, which gotinnocent young girls “into the game” (atheme that had become popular with Fer-nando de Rojas “Celestina” (“Procuress”)in 1499) [SEE Figure 25]. But the painting“Majas on the Balcony” [SEE Figure 26]shows clearly the “men in the shadows,”behind their backs. The Inquisition, and thepolice of the king, were probably runninglarge chunks of organized prostitution, atraditional tool of information-gatheringfor most intelligence services.

The ‘Ilustrados’ and RepublicanPopular CultureGoya and his friend Léandro Fernandez deMoratin rejected the idea of a culturereserved exclusively for the elites and thesalons, as did the most enlightened of thenobility. Through the theater, in particular,Moratin tried to take up the great challengeof changing the cultural environment, anecessity in terms of both day-to-day politi-cal fights, and long-term human potential.How many intrigues and palace coups weresettled in the streets of Madrid by themanipulation of a whipped-up “populacho”(rabble)? Not only in Spain, but elsewhere?A population de-sensitized through bull-fighting and public executions of “heretics,”

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FIGURE 24. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, “Time and the Old Ladies,”1808-1812. Taking up Caprichos, Plate 55, this painting gives an extra

twist to the cartoon, since the old bearded man—Time, whom we saw inthe “Allegory of the 1812 Constitution” [Figure 3]—is about to sweep the

elderly oligarchs away with his broomstick. Queen Maria-Luisa is generallyidentified, because she wears in her hair the same arrow-shaped diamond

hairpin seen in the portrait of the royal family (Figure 20).

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Figure 23. Caprichos, Plate 2,“They say yes and give theirhand to the first comer.”

and further debased by theater productionsaimed at appealing to the lowest instincts(similar to today’s soap operas), was a gravethreat to the republican spirit of govern-ment “of, by, and for the people.”

Moratin expressed his convictions in a1791 letter to Godoy, criticizing the worksof Ramon de la Cruz (1731-1794), the mostpopular playwright of his day, whose pro-ductions did nothing but reflect

the life and customs of the most miser-able rabble: the tavern keepers, chestnutsellers, pickpockets, imbeciles, rag sellers,blackguards, jailbirds, and, all in all, thedisgusting doings of the Madrid slums:such are the characters of these pieces.The cigar, the gambling house, the dag-ger, drunkenness, dissipation, abandon-ment, all the vices of such pieces rolledtogether, are painted in seductive colors . . . .If theater is the school of behavior, howcan one correct vice, error, and absurdity,when the same people who ought to beamending them are propagating them?

Moratin argued that the Hollywood-

style repertoire of some 450 de la Cruz“sainetes” (25-minute, one-act sketches),were becoming popular among “the high-est levels of society.” To which de la Cruzresponded, that he was not a degenerate,merely a realist, who wrote of the real lifeone could live in Madrid.

Moratin passed the year 1787 in Paris,where he entered into an ongoing dialoguewith Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), a play-wright and reformer of the Italian theaterin exile in France, who was the Italian lan-guage teacher to the Court of Louis XV. In1786, Moratin had already written his firstcomedy, “El viejo y la nina” (“The OldMan and the Girl”) and the year before, hehad published, anonymously, a pamphlet,the “Derrota de los pedants” (“Rout of thePedants”), mocking bad poets and authors.To ridicule the surrounding anti-culture,Moratin even founded a burlesque societywith his friends, with the name of the“acalophiles” (“lovers of ugliness,” fromthe Greek a-kalos), of which Goya mighthave been a member.

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FIGURE 25. Francisco Goya y Lucientes,“Maja and Celestina (Procuress) on theBalcony,” 1808-1812.

FIGURE 26. Francisco Goya y Lucientes,“Majas on theBalcony,” 1810-1812.

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The Beast-Man and the‘Pinturas negras’It would be impossible to comment onevery one of Goya’s works, and their inter-action with his revolutionary time. But,having discussed at least some aspectsabove, I will now try to go to the essence ofhis work, by underlining his very special,unique contribution.

Having participated in the revolutionaryregime of Carlos III, and then having experi-enced its overthrow by the very oligarchyCarlos III had combatted, Goya had an acutecomprehension of the difference betweenman’s true humanity, his cognitive nature inthe image of the Creator, and the Beast-Manphenomenon—an understanding he mobi-lized to provoke a universal awakening ofconscience capable of stopping it.

There remains the question of what canlead men to become Neros, Torquemadas,Napoleons, or Hitlers; what can bringthem to commit such horrible crimes, thatthey can justly be called Satanists, in thesense of depriving mankind, and men, oftheir dignity as human beings.

Goya points the finger, and it requiredenormous courage to do so, at the egoismof the ancien régime, a generation so preoc-cupied with itself, that it was prepared todevour its own offspring, rather than bedeprived of its own pleasure, privilege, andcomfort.

This is Goya’s enduring “heavy idea,”which appears towards the end of the Dis-asters of War, a series of etchings producedduring the French occupation of Spain[SEE Figure 27, selected Plates].

That war was for France what today’sIraq war is for the United States. Projectedto require less than six days, Napoleon’sGrande Armée would stay for six years,because every Spanish corpse that fell tothe ground became a new barricade.Immortalized by Goya’s paintings, the“Dos” and “Tres de Mayos” [SEE Appen-dix, Figure A, page 44], the war would seethe birth of the “guerrilla” (“little war”).

We have no more need for the Inquisition(abolished by Joseph Bonaparte), says Goyain the Disasters. Denunciations, torture,strangulation, bodies chopped into pieces—it is now all done by the people themselves,bestialized by an unjust and absurd war!

Goya’s horror recalls the declaration ofAbraham Lincoln’s General Sherman, whosaid, to the graduating class of the MilitaryAcademy of Michigan in 1879: “It is onlythose who have neither fired a shot, norheard the shrieks and groans of the wound-ed, who cry aloud for blood, more ven-geance, and more desolation. War is hell.”

After having reconstructed and engravedinnumerable, unbearable deeds of French-men (and Polish officers) against Spaniards,acts of men against women, of humansagainst humans, all behaving inhumanly,Goya tries to advance some kind of answerto the question, “Why?” He gives his answerin Plate 71, which has the caption, “Againstthe common good,” below a portrait of some

42

FIGURE 27.Francisco Goya yLucientes,Disasters of War,Plate 71, “Againstthe commongood.”

FIGURE 27.Disasters of War,Plate 72, “Theconsequences.”

sort of Grand Inquisitor with bat-wings forears! What does this have to do with thewar? Plate 72, “The consequences,” shows amonster devouring the corpse of a man whoresembles the figure in Plate 1 [SEE Appen-dix, Figure C, page 45]. The Beast-Man ofPlate 71, becomes a total beast in Plate 72.This theme is restated in Plate 81, the“Fierce Monster,” where an ogre eats/vom-its human corpses. It is possible that some ofthese plates were done for the Caprichos, butremoved because of their virulence; theycertainly form a bridge to that series.

Is it war, then, that is the ultimate follyof the sleep of reason? That this “mon-strous” subject—which is much more than amere “subject,” as it encompasses the future ofhumanity—haunted Goya, is not a sign ofmental illness, but the contrary!

In 1823, angered by the crushing, by theFrench Army under orders of the Con-gress of Vienna, of the last attempt toadopt the 1812 Constitution of Cadiz,Goya covers the beautiful landscapes anddancing giants he painted on the walls ofthe “Quinta dels Sordo,” his house in theoutskirts of Madrid, with his “Pinturasnegras” (“Black paintings”).23 Along withsome 12,000 families of Spanish “ilustra-dos,” Goya went into exile in France.

His “Saturn devouring one of hissons”—Saturn being the Roman (Latin)name for the Greek Titan Cronos, associat-ed with time (chronos)—expresses the ulti-mate outcome of the extreme logic of theoligarchy: Since we refuse to create a futurefor the coming generations, let’s preventthem from existing! [SEE Figure 28]

Conscious of that monstrosity, Goyatold his friend Zapatar in a letter: “I’m notafraid of witches, hobgoblins, apparitions,boastful giants, knaves, or varlets, etc., norindeed of any kind of beings, except ofhuman beings” (February 1784).

It was this monster that haunted Goya,and which he fought; neither as a DonQuixote, nor as a Sancho Panza, but as arepublican enlightened by the sources ofRenaissance Christian humanism. It is upto us to honor his life and works, byputting the last Beast-Men of our time inthe requisite cages!

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FIGURE 27.Disasters of War,Plate 81, “FierceMonster!”

FIGURE 28. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, “Saturn devouring one of his sons,” 1820-1823. Romantics and existentialists are generally incapable of coming up with a credibleexplanation of this image. They claim that it is the expression of Goya’s “profoundpessimism” regarding “the evil nature of man.” In reality, Goya is using a powerfulmetaphor to present a “heavy idea.” Saturn is the Roman name for the Greek TitanCronos (time=chronos). The artist points his finger at the egoism of the “ancien régime,”a generation so preoccupied with itself, that it would rather devour its offspring, than bedeprived of its own privileges and comfort. That this concept was not a simple outburst ofblind rage, when Goya was covering his walls with the “Black paintings” after theSpanish republicans were crushed in 1823, is proven by a red chalk study of the samesubject, datable long before 1800, and planned for the Caprichos.

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Let us underline here, that if Goya hadtrouble with the Inquisition, it was

precisely because he was a Christianhumanist, as was the great Cervantes. Intotal opposition to his reputation as viru-lent religion-hater, many elements prove

the fact that Goya, like his friend Jovel-lanos and other “ilustrados,” was a whole-hearted Christian. According to somesources, Goya even started each letter hewrote with a cross.

For a long time, attentive observers

AP P E N D I X

Goya and Christianity

FIGURE A. Francisco Goya yLucientes, “Tres de Mayo,”1814. Napoleon grew morehated by the Spanish people

every day he occupied Spain,but he faced no organized

opposition. This changed whenhis troops picked people off the

streets of Madrid at random foran all-night orgy of executions.

Although his forces had beenable to march into Spain almostwithout firing a shot, Napoleon

now faced hand-to-handcombat with men, women, and

even children. Goya is carefulto show almost every type of

emotion on the faces of thevictims, but the executioners

are faceless, anonymous,machine-like.

FIGURE B. MiguelGamborino, engraving, 1813.

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have identified the similarity of pose,arms in the air, of the standing man ofthe “Tres de Mayos” [SEE Figure A], apainting done in 1814 to commemoratethe martyrs of 1808, and the pose ofChrist on the cross. Here, it is the martyr,a simple citizen in a white shirt, whounobtrusively displays the stigmata on hishands. There is no longer any doubt thatthe composition is based on an engravingby Miguel Gamborino, done in 1813, ofthe execution of several clergymen in theMurviedro quarter of Madrid [SEE FigureB], Goya discreetly doing some honor tothe priests and monks who fought for thenation. Others have identified the kneel-ing man of the introductory etching ofthe Disasters of War series, with the imageof the Christ at Golgotha, the “secularversion of the theme of the prayingChrist in the garden of Gesthemane,” asthe critic Hans Seldmayr puts it [SEE

Figure C].After all, Goya and his friend Martin

Zapater, got their early education at the“Escuelas Pias,” religious schools foundedby a courageous priest from Aragon, Joséde Calasanz (1557-1648).

Recall that Spain was one of the coun-tries that had seen the most translationsand editions of the works of Erasmusbefore they were banned by the Councilof Trent in 1559. Cervantes himself was apupil of the Erasmian Lopez de Hoyos,and Goya did two drawings after Eras-mus’s portraits. Thus, it is not astonishingthat there appeared in Spain a man likeCalasanz, who, despite much oppositionfrom the Vatican, battled for free publiceducation for all, given in the vernacu-lar—a real revolution in that period,when schooling took place exclusively inLatin.

Calasanz was a contemporary of Tom-maso Campanella (1568-1639), author ofthe City of the Sun, who spent 20 years injail for his opposition to the Inquisition.Calasanz and a certain number of reli-gious schools took a stand in defense ofCampanella’s friend Galileo against theInquisition, without endorsing Galileo’s

empiricist method, however. Goya,trained by the “piarists,” did a drawing ofan unidentified bound man, with thecaption, “for having discovered themovement of the Earth,” a clear refer-ence to Galileo’s refusal to recant on theEarth’s movement—a physical principlefirst enunciated for the Renaissance byCardinal Nicolaus of Cusa [SEE FigureD].

This might explain the great love formankind that animated so many “ilustra-dos.” The enthusiastic initiative of Campo-manes to teach literature to poor childrenwhen an adolescent himself, or the battleof Jovellanos to establish higher educationin the Spanish language—all of this comesas an echo of the flame of this Christianhumanism, slowly penetrating into the

FIGURE D. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, “For discoveringthe movement of the Earth,”brush, 1810-1814. Note, again,the cruciform, outstretchedarms.

FIGURE C. FranciscoGoya y Lucientes, Disastersof War, Plate 1, “Sad pre-sentiments of what mustcome to pass.”

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Spanish church.There is also that exceptional portrait,

done by Goya, of Juan Antonio Llorente(1756-1823) [SEE Figure E], the formerSecretary General of the Inquisition whodenounced its evil practices in his Historyof the Spanish Inquisition, published whenhe was in exile in France in 1815, andagainst which Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) seems to have written, as a response,his Letters to a Russian Gentleman on theSpanish Inquisition that same year. In anycase, Goya retained a fond memory forhis teacher “padre Joaquin,” and in 1819,he would paint the beautiful “Last Com-munion of San José de Calasanz” [SEE

Figure F].While drawing his famous etching in

the Caprichos, “The sleep of reason pro-duces monsters,” Goya may well havebeen thinking of a little saying ofCalasanz, who liked to remark that, “thedissipated ecclesiastic is the joy of thedevil.”

—KVFIGURE E. Francisco Goya y Lucientes,“Portrait of Juan Antonio Llorente,” 1810-1812 (detail).

FIGURE F. Francisco Goya yLucientes,“The Last Communionof José de Calasanz,” 1819.Commissioned by the Escolapianorder in Madrid, the paintingcommemorates the momentCalasanz, some 90 years old andclose to death, insisted on risingfrom his deathbed to take HolyCommunion before an audienceof his pupils. For Calasanz, the“dissipated ecclesiastic is the joy ofthe devil.” S

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1. For a full treatment of this subject, see William F.Wertz, Jr. and Cruz del Carmen Moreno de Cota,“Spain’s Carlos III and the American System,” Fidelio,Summer 2004 (Vol. XIII, No. 1-2).

2. After being paralyzed for six months, Goya becameirremediably deaf in 1793. Although symptoms of spa-tial-temporal dysfunction were observed beginning1776, the thesis of poisoning cannot be dismissed, as itwas very common at that time. Even the future king,Ferdinand VII, was accused of preparing the poisoningof his own mother, to gain the throne. In this period,other sympathizers of the American Revolution devel-oped strange health problems: the untimely death ofMozart (1791), and the deafness of Beethoven (begin-ning 1798), are two such cases. On the other hand, bothmeningitis and toxification caused by intensive expo-sure to the white lead in oil painting, are not to beexcluded. Yet another poison that killed many patientswas bad doctors: Goya represented them as donkeys, asin Plate 40 of the Caprichos, “Of what evil will he die?”

3. Among the modern existentialists, for example, CharlesBaudelaire shamelessly said that, “The great merit ofGoya is the creation of a plausible unnatural [monstrous-ness],” while he considered his work, “a nightmare ofunknown things, of fetuses boiled at the center of Sab-baths, of old people in front of mirrors, and naked chil-dren”; André Malraux, more inspired on the subject,thought that Goya was mainly sensitive “in a nearly brutalfashion, to the demons and the terror within each of us”;Aldous Huxley expressed his morbid fascination, statingthat, “Many engravings of Goya refer to strictly privateevents that take place at the obscure levels of the mind andtheir creator”; Théophile Gauthier: “There exists especial-ly a really fantastic engraving that is the most awful night-mare that we have dreamed: his title, ‘They are not yetleaving.’ It is terrifying, and Dante himself does not arriveat this level of suffocating terror; imagine a naked gloomyfield above which hangs a cloud with the strange shape ofa disembowelled crocodile, and then a big stone, a tomb-stone that a suffering meagre figure tries to uplift . . . .”

4. Paul Mantz, writing the article on “Goya” in an 1859dictionary, says: “Goya painted as in a feverish deliri-um. He often treats the form with absolute disdain; thiswas both out of ignorance, and intentional. Howeverbizarre, this master, who seems happy with ugliness,cultivated a strong sentiment for female grace and thepiquant attitudes of the beautiful girls of Spain. What-ever can be said, Goya, so errant, so crazy, so incom-plete in his paintings, left behind a series of caricaturesof great value.”

5. For the Synarchist roots of Spain’s Hitler-allied dictatorFrancisco Franco, and the continuing legacy of Franco-ism in the organizing of today’s Nazi International bySpanish Franco protégé Blas Piñar, see Special Report:The Synarchist Resurgence Behind the Madrid TrainBombing of March 11, 2004, ed. by Tony Papert (Lees-burg, Va.: LaRouche in 2004, June 2004).

6. The only polemical drawings published during his life-time were the Caprichos, printed in a dependency of theFrench Embassy in Madrid in 1799.

The “Tauromachies” (lithography) were not pub-lished until 1855.

The Disasters of War was only published in 1863,although it had been produced in the 1808-1814 inter-

val, and used in 1814 for the elaboration, in the paint-ings “Dos de Mayo” and “Tres de Mayo,” of the eventsof 1808.

The “Disparates,” or “Proverbs,” was never published.The “Pinturas negras” were discovered in 1868 by

Goya’s friend Bernardo de Iriarte.7. The erudite Spanish historian Enrique Lafuente Ferrati

has indicated similarities between certain images of theCaprichos and the 1776 engravings in France by CharlesMonnet for the edition of Charles Palisseau de Mon-tenoy’s (1731-1814) burlesque poem, “The Dunciade, or,The War of Fools” (1764), a polemic against Diderot,Voltaire, and the Enlightenment esprit. Similarities to cer-tain drawings of Fragonard have also been acknowl-edged.

8. In 1825, Goya answered a letter from his friend, thebanker Joaquin Maria Ferrer, considered by Frenchpolice “a dangerous revolutionary,” who was also inexile in Bordeaux. Goya tells him he was forced to stopthe sale, because the “Santa” had accused him.

9. One is reminded of the English nursery rhyme: “Baby,baby, he’s a giant / Tall and black as Monmouthsteeple, / And he breakfasts, dines, and suppers / Everyday on naughty people. / Baby mine, if Boney hearsyou / As he gallops past the house, / Limb from limb atonce he’ll tear you, / Just as pussy tears a mouse.” It hasto be emphasized that, initially, the engraving of theColossus was planned to open the Disasters of War, aseries on the disastrous French occupation of Spain.

10. It is fairly well documented that pressure was placed onLouis XVI by the inner core of Louis XV’s privatesecret service (Le secret du Roi), and Lafayette’s imme-diate liaison officer Charles-François de Broglie (1719-1781) in particular. Gilles Perrault, Le secret du Roi (seeRecommended Reading for publication information).

11. If von Steuben was crucial to the military training at Val-ley Forge, so too did the receipt of the money equivalent offive million pounds of war materiel help Washington winthe decisive Battle of Saratoga in 1777. Half the fundscame from the French and Spanish Bourbon kings, whilethe rest came from French and European sympathizers ofthe American cause. The ships of Rodrigue, Hortalez etCie (Beaumarchais) sailed from Bordeaux, Le Havre, andMarseilles. In August 1779, some 2,000 Spanish troopsunder the command of Bernardo de Gálvez open a flankagainst the British in Louisiana. In 1781, at Yorktown,6,000 insurgents led by Washington, supported by theFrench volunteers of Lafayette, faced 8,000 British troopsunder the direction of Cornwallis, until the arrival of the5,000-man French expeditionary force of Rochambeaugave the victory to the Continental Army. The victory atSaratoga prepared the way for the later diplomatic recog-nition of the United States by France in 1783.

12. De Maistre letter from Moscow to Chevalier de Rossi,1808, quoted in Evan S. Connell, Goya, A Life (NewYork: Counterpoint, 2004), p. 126. For more on deMaistre and the “Beast-Man,” see Children of Satan(Washington, D.C.: LaRouche in 2004, 2004). Nor is itastonishing that another Satanist, the English Pre-Raphaelite John Ruskin, allegedly the greatest art criticof his day, in a fit of moral hysteria, burned an entire setof Goya’s Caprichos in his fireplace, as a gesture againstwhat he conceived to be Goya’s intellectual and moralignobility.

NOTES

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13. Jeanne Baticle, Goya, d’or et de sang (Paris: Gallimard,1987), p. 25.

14. Quoted in the online encyclopaedia Imago Mundi,http://www.cosmovisions.com.

15. It would be interesting in this regard to inquire into thevisit of Beaumarchais to Spain in 1764. While inMadrid, Beaumarchais represented the important bank-ing family Parîs-Duvernay, the financiers of Louis XVand Mme. de Pompadour. He met José Clavijo y Fajar,the science minister of Carlos III who worked withAlexander von Humboldt. His stay in Spain providedBeaumarchais with the material for the Barber ofSeville, used by Rossini in his opera of the same name.

16. Goya owned 25 shares of the Banco de San Carlos. Hispresence at one of the meetings of the stockholders inFebruary 1788 is documented.

17. Martin Zapater was treasurer and a member of theAragonese Economic Society of Friends of the Country.

The Duchess of Osuna directed the “Damas Junta,”women’s council, of the Economic Society of Friendsof the Country in Madrid, and organized her own“tertulias” (intellectual soirées). She and the Duke ofOsuna were Goya’s first patrons, and the Duke per-sonally intervened to save Goya’s life when the circu-lation of the Caprichos was ordered stopped. TheOsunas had a mansion in the suburb of Madrid called“El Capricho,” where literary and musical soiréeswere organized. For six years, the Duchess employedJoseph Haydn (1732-1809) to write music for her. Itwas she who commissioned Goya to paint a series ofpaintings illustrating literature dealing with witch-craft. One of them, now lost, featured the famousstone Commendatore Mozart used in his Don Giovanni.She also fought to stop the degradation of women inSpanish society, which put her in direct opposition tothe Duchess of Alba. It is believed by some that it wasduring a visit to the home of the Alba family in south-ern Spain during December of 1792 that Goya mayhave been poisoned.

18. See Wertz and Moreno de Cota, op. cit.19. Anti-Jewish legislation was first called for in the

Fourth Lateran Council at Rome in 1215. Such legisla-tion was never fully enforced in Spain because of pow-

erful Jewish opposition, but the Cortes of Castile didapprove of it in 1371, and later in 1405. The questionerupted in 1391, in the worst series of massacres eversuffered by Jews in the peninsula. Over 4,000 weremurdered in Seville alone; pogroms occurred in all thelargest cities of Spain; the ghettoes of Seville, Barcelona,Valencia, and Toledo were totally wiped out. Thosewho were not murdered, were compelled to acceptbaptism. Thus did the “conversos,” or “New Chris-tians,” come into existence. They soon came to be dis-trusted even more than the Jews, as they were consid-ered to be a fifth column within the body of theChurch. From Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition(New York: New American Library, 1965).–KK

20. The activity of the Inquisition was not always sointense. The last great ceremonial demonstration of itspower was the immense “auto-da-fé” (“act of faith”) inthe Plaza Mayor in Madrid in 1680. To open a celebra-tion of his wedding, King Carlos II personally lit thestakes of 27 “judaizers” (“conversos” suspected ofsecretly practicing Judaism). Abolished by JosephBonaparte during the 1808-1814 interval of the Frenchoccupation, it was reestablished by Ferdinand VII, andlater abolished for good in 1834.

21. A description of Pestalozzi’s educational reforms, whichwere championed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, can befound in Marianna Wertz, “Education and Character:The Classical Curriculum of Wilhelm von Humboldt,”Fidelio, Summer 1996 (Vol. V, No. 2). One of the geniusesto come out of these schools was the celebrated Germangeometer Jacob Steiner (1796-1863), father of syntheticgeometry, and teacher of Bernhard Riemann.

22. See footnote 7.23. Recent x-ray analysis of paintings now in the Prado in

Madrid, as well as stratigraphic examinations, have shownthat, with one exception, what is now visible are over-paints. Maurice and Jacqueline Guillaud mention joyousfigures and landscapes painted over by Goya, or eventual-ly by someone else. For example, underneath “Saturn,”stands a giant dancer with a leg raised, while Laocadia,Goya’s young love, reposes her arm on a chimney. “Thedog,” of which only the head is visible today, might havebeen one of the few details Goya refused to cover.

RECOMMENDED READING

Jeanne Baticle, Goya, Painter of Terrible Splendor, translatedfrom the French by Alexandra Campbell (New York:Abrams, 1994).

Georges Boudaille, Goya (Paris: Nouvelles EditionsFrançaises, 1979).

Evan S. Connell, Francisco Goya, A Life (New York: Coun-terpoint, 2004).

Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, Goya: His Complete Etchings,Aquatints, and Lithographs, translated from the Spanishby Raymond Rudorff (New York: Abrams, 1962).

Pierre Gassier, The Drawings of Goya: The Complete Albums,translated from the French by Robert Allen and JamesEmmons (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973).

Werner Hofmann, Goya, das Zeitalter der Revolution(Munich: Prestel, 1980).

Robert Hughes, Goya (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).Gilles Perrault, Le Secret du Roi (Vol. I, 1992); L’ombre de la

Bastille (Vol. II, 1993); and La Revanche américaine (Vol.III, 1996) (Paris: Fayard, Collection livre de poche).

Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Goya, translated from theFrench by Alexandra Campbell (New York: Holt, c.1990).

Goya, génie et monde (Paris: Hachette, 1964).Karel Vereycken, “Comment la folie d’Erasme sauva la

civilisation,” http://solidariteetprogres.online.frWilliam F. Wertz, Jr. and Cruz del Carmen Moreno de

Cota,“Spain’s Carlos III and the American System,”Fidelio, Spring/Summer 2004 (Vol. XIII, No. 1-2).

Judith Wyer, “Goya, Las Luces, and the National Bank ofSpain,” The Campaigner, August 1978 (Vol. 11, No. 6).