The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was doomed by the new fashion for marble. The young Goya first studied in his home town before graduating to Madrid, rising through academy and court circles and navigating his way through the reigns of three Bourbon kings and the intervening rule of Joseph Bonaparte before retiring to Bordeaux in his late seventies.
From early commissions for religious frescoes, altarpieces and tapestry cartoons for royal palaces, he went on to paint celebrations of everyday Spain en fête and to establish a portrait practice encompassing all the leading figures of the wildly fluctuating political scene in the capital.
As his fortunes rose, his creativity broadened in both technique and subject matter. Drawing and painting were supplemented by etching, lithography and miniature-painting, light-hearted social scenes joined by reflections of a very different kind. Goya the successful courtier became the witness for all time to the savagery and inhumanity visited on Spain by years of war and destitution.
Goya’s ‘black paintings’ of devils and giants were his ‘visual metaphor for the underside of the enlightenment’
It is a complex story that Janis Tomlinson has to tell, but the armature for Goya’s life is provided by an astonishing wealth of scholarship.
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