Goya: The Most Spanish of Artists

good afternoon and welcome the title of our exhibition Goya order and disorder seem to be an effective and catchy way to express our aims in the exhibition it tells of the broad range of Goya subject matter from portraits to witchcraft to war each seeming to encapsulate aspects of both states order and disorder it captures the transitional times from a nation moving forward from an obscure intest under enlightenment reforms to one beset with occupation war and counter balancing forces determined to maintain the status quo and most importantly it captures the way Goya is artistic practice conferred order on these grand and complex themes however the subject of this talk Oya as a Spanish artist is not one that was dealt with explicitly in the exhibition but it's a topic that has been interesting and intriguing for us to pursue it's beyond our scope to define the essential qualities of Spanish art but rather to show points of connection between Goya and his compatriots as well as departure points we will also touch on some of the uniquely Spanish and subjects that Goya explored such as bullfighting the Spanish Inquisition costume and popular custom furthermore we will demonstrate some of the ways the Spaniard gorya who lived somewhat apart from your European culture distinguished himself from his European peers so I'm going to begin with a case study in Goya Spanish this and this is the famous painting of the parasol you see on the screen it's in the second room of the exhibition and part of its Spanish this is in its costume but Stephanie we'll talk about that later in our lecture but it also has an important presence this is a study or rather a cartoon a full-scale preparatory design for a tapestry to be woven by the royal tapestry factory to go above a door in the palace of the escorial you see a bright sunny day strong saturated colors the human figures dominate the setting in fact the setting is relatively abbreviated doesn't really account for much there is a wall at the left which suggests that these two are outside the city and it's a place where rules could be a little bit different overall it's more circumspect more mysterious question indeed is is the young man who's holding the parasol over the pretty girls had to see her servant or her suitor or both the point is made with a contemporary painting look at a French example parasol 1777 this is 1771 it's in the Frick Collection in New York by Fragonard the French artists make clear it's not a tapestry cartoon but it is still room decoration now you notice immediately there's just much more detail a lot is going on here individual flowers and was this is sort of outside the city walls this seems to be an enclosed and very highly cultivated garden there's an overt narrative it's pretty clear this couple they're now well together and they are amused as they read love letters as when they first began courting there's not really any mystery here specifically upper-class everything is highly in order in its right place and go is sort of this is kind of brash sense to Goya and also a lot more really cultivation of mystery and that I think is a sensitive essential to his own character and perhaps as well to Spanish art now ordering disorder is the title of our exhibition and it refers to the two states or poles that play against each other in goings-on work more often than not going focused on the fertile territory between order and disorder now the terms order disorder also refers to Goya zone time he lived as the age of reason moved in neoclassicism 18th century enlightenment all ideals of order but also gave way to revolution to war and then also to a romanticism a new movement where emotional impulses were to be cultivated and celebrated and we also a Stephanie just says we use the dialectic of order and disorder to ascribe how Gao is own artistry the way he analyzed the world imposed order on chaos now we've got here one of the leading ladies in our exhibition the Duchess of Alba and you know you would think this would be as ordered as you could imagine right this is an aristocratic woman the number two noble woman in Spain dominating her landscape but if you look more closely there's a fascinating signature written in the sand not from the point of view of the viewer but rather from that of the Duchess inside the picture she's looking out and pointing down and the two words blower solo Goya only Goa implying that only Goya was good enough to be able to paint her portrait and only Goya could have carried off such a grand likeness so it's an intrusion a rather cheeky one by the artist into this aristocratic portrait it says something about their good-natured friendship but also it said something about Goya not wanting things to be initially one or the other he likes a mixing or alternatively this is one of the most terrific prints from that famous series the disasters of war in response to the Napoleonic invasions of Spain called the Peninsular war this title is called great deeds against the dead from around 1811 and it's you see immediately evidence of mayhem there's been a massacre dismembered corpses have been thrown up against the tree but if you think a little more we realize this is not so much reportage but rather Goya's own artistic creation he has emblazoned these body arts across the sheet arranging them artfully they're all beautiful body bodies there but arrange them as if they are fragments of Greek or Roman statues this idea of disorder in order continues throughout is over and by the way most of the things were showing you by Goya in this act in the slides today are in the exhibition so this is another kind of recap or depending if you've yet to see the show it can help serve as an orientation and indeed at the end of the talk I will speak a little further about some of the main themes of the show as a way to further prepare you for your first or indeed subsequent visits to the exhibition on the Left we've got the fall 1786 and on the right a shipwreck 1793 the one on the left on canvas the one on the Rights on tin and the one on the right is in the exhibition both in the exhibition it it shows a minor accident in an otherwise too ordered world it's a it's a kind of paradise you see a kind of Garden of Eden you might even say someone's fallen from a horse and whereas on the right you'd think oh well clearly this is disorder it's worse a ship is crashed the survivors are huddled on a rock but indeed as the figures work together to help save each other there's a sense of humanity triumphing over adversity and so these this kind of picture it's a disaster picture in that it falls into a much bigger theme and then late 18th century where you look at this pic aynd of painting like this and you get a free song and think oh well it's okay you know we survived or we're at least we're okay and there's a kind of sense in these kind of paintings that you would look at cataclysms and waterfalls and such for their excitement it's the ideal of the sublime we as the viewer get close to something dangerous and then feel relief and having survived this so within this disorder on the right the figures work together to help each other did you to look a little bit at that then and another view of Goya self-portrait so these two revealing self-portraits show Goya at two different stages one in the prime of life in 1795 and the other somewhat worse for the wear 20 years later perhaps a very brief summing up of some of the basic facts of Goya's life will be useful here born in Spain in 1746 he lived at a time of revolution war and cultural change at the birth of the modern age he saw the early stages of democracy in the American and French Revolutions and he saw its downside in the reign of terror and the Peninsular war boy arose from modest beginnings in Saragosa where he trained under a provincial painter but he was ambitious for position and status and above all had confidence in his abilities he was a genius but show too slow to show his full potential he made the requisition requisite so during Italy to expand his artistic experience and training on his return from Italy he gained to work with religious commissions tapestry cartoons and finally achieved success as a portrait painter during the course of his life he was court painter to four kings that did not always mean steady work but he did receive a salary they're not always on time during midlife he was beset by a series of illnesses that left him deaf for life simultaneously he began a campaign of drawing in albums turned to printmaking and he strove to relieve himself of the burden of commissioned works his style and subject matter changed radically at this point in 1793 again we'll look at the the fall and the deluge of biblical subject to some extent on the left the fall commissioned for the Oh Sooners Goya's most generous and enlightened patrons the fall is part of a scheme of countryside scheme schemes made to decorate their country house the painting shows a mishap on mishap on an outing a woman perhaps the Duchess has fallen from a mule she is helped by an abbot her friend bemoans the accident in a fit of his histrionics on the right one of Goya's inventions on tin plate here is a true Quebec catastrophe in a shipwreck amidst the natural chaos Koya examines the human and emotional response to this disaster portraits and religious works continued to provide him modest sustenance in 1808 Napoleonic troops invaded and occupied the Iberian Peninsula which gave rise to war bought by the Spanish army and Spanish guerrillas until 1814 during this war Koya executed the prince known as the disasters of war this was not war reporting by the series of imagined visual reflections on the violence and famine associated with this war throughout his life he continuously sought ways to express his ideas gain Fame and earn money as a seventy-year-old artist he produced the series on bullfighting called Toro Makia when the Spanish king returned to power after the war he preferred another artist Koya eventually left Spain for France to be with friends to find new inspiration and possibly a new market for his work he died in Bordeaux France in 1828 not so long ago perhaps in the mid twentieth century the common belief was that Goya the inspired creative genius whose images seemed to describe what we were striving to imagine sprang full-blown head and shoulders above his contemporaries he owed little to his tradition never mind to the world around him glorious works are so innovative and seemed to be without precedent that it certainly appeared that way claiming inspiration and nature as his sources his own writings rarely acknowledge a debt to anyone or the past in his 1792 address advocating reform of the curriculum of the Royal Academy he praised kolache for the liberality with which he and his followers followed their own spirits in this address he also asserted there are no rules in painting by this he meant not that the rules of geometry and perspective had to be broken but they should be secondary to inspiration from nature and instinct in one of his last letters in which he described his small miniatures on ivory he referred to the free brushstrokes by velázquez his son in a biographical sketch of 1832 mentioned only Rembrandt and Velazquez as artists whom Goya revered so this is the extent of primary documentation we have that Goya looked to his own tradition or other artists another but highlights of his early life indicate that Goya did not grow in a vacuum his artistic training as a painter in Zaragoza under Jose loosen involved copying prints we have to assume that these were prints after European paintings he certainly came under the influence of the Bohemian neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Meng's court painter in Madrid who supervised Goa's early work the works of the Neapolitan gia Quinto and the Venetians yet below both of whom worked in Spain surrounded him on his 1769 to 1771 trip to Italy including Rome and Parma the Italian notebook he carried with him demonstrates that he saw works of both a classical work world and the Renaissance it is also hard to imagine that he didn't come into contact with prints from northern Europe as well as the Italians so you see the Goya straining and broad early experience provided a solid foundation for an aspiring painter but one of the paradoxical qualities that have sealed his identity and simultaneously spawned in the traditions of his own country while taking inspiration from no one and still possessing an outlook that is eternally relevant in 1775 Koya began work making cartoons for tapestries for the palaces of Charles the third it was part of a team supervised by mangs and the architect Sabatini this work continued in spurts into the early years of the reign of Charles the fourth his instructions from this new king were to paint diversions of the Spanish countryside with humor this comic or humorous point of view often tinged with playful or bitter irony is one that pervades Spanish art to this day it is to be found in Golden Age literature of servantes up to the films of Pedro Elmo Elmo Java Almodovar in visual terms we see grotesque characters and fools on medieval choir stalls but humor has yet entered the world of the Spanish academic painter but it is possibly in Goya's work that we first see an artist working for the Spanish Court injecting comic by play with satirical undertones and major works with realistic settings here you see these happy young women and Spanish attire having their way with the straw mannequin dressed as a French standing for some of you linguists in the audience we've I've wandered for a few years whether this is the origin of the term straw man he they're tossing him up perhaps as an argument that can be brought down readily Gore's sardonic view of life's wacky and weird moments such as much of his work throughout his career soon after beginning on the tapestry cartoons he became deeply involved with the paintings of his Spanish predecessors in 1778 he was given the assignment of making etchings after the 17th century court painter Diego Velazquez this was part of a project initiated by the spanish prime minister Floridablanca and the art historian antonio ponce it was aimed to publicize Spanish art beyond Spain and Goya is debt to Velazquez is stronger than any other influence over a period of five or six years go years Goa made sixteen prints after Velazquez has worked in the Royal Collection in these line edgings he assumed aspired to find the technical means to duplicate painterly tone with a multiplicity of tools and processes while this compounding of means soon wrecked the plate it's apparent that Gordon made every effort to discover Velasquez's sense of space light and atmosphere when Goya applied for the third time for membership to the I'm going in chronological order here so when Goya applied for the third time for membership to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1780 he submitted a massive devotional work that suppressed and much of the freedom and energy exhibited up to this point in religious commissions tapestry cartoons and the prince after Velazquez his Christ on the cross on the right pointedly nods both to the austerity of Velasquez's paintings of the same subject as well as to the neoclassical restraint in composition color and mood attributed to the influence of Ming's Koya superior skill in anatomy and a facility in conveying spiritual pain in Christ's face finally secured him admission as acted omission made at the same time he was working on the prints after Velazquez joy as Garrett hood man explores with great intensity and detail the pain of death experienced by a solitary condemned prisoner in 1783 upon the recommendation of the Prime Minister Floridablanca Gore was some to the estate of the exiled brother of the King Charles the third the Infante Don Louie Don Louie was something of a reprobate scandalizing the court with womanizing and gambling he was forced into a morganatic marriage to a much younger woman of lesser noble status this marriage ensured that the children would remain outside the line of succession to the throne however it seems to have been a happy solution for all there in the countryside Koya became part of the noble household going hunting in the princes party when he wasn't painting he also painted individual portraits of family members and this grand group portrait well comparisons can be made to European and American family portraits goriias allegiance is clearly to Velasquez's las meninas this first major portrait commissioned catapulted him into popularity as a portrait painter to the highest ranks of society go back to the last case just so you can put look at that to a bit go back again so here we know numerous points of comparison between the two works evidence of loyal patronage the behind-the-scenes informality of a family addressed the introduction of disfigured characters of a more humble station and both include the artist himself each artist knows his place within the group compare Velazquez who had achieved the prominence in the court of Charles the fourth who stands proudly at left facing out while Goya the artist starting out takes a more suburban position Velasquez's handling of space is a complex achievement Gore seems to have been stymied by the problem of including so many figures but this gift for portraiture seen in the vitality and individuality of each face will take him far he learned well from Velasquez his portrait of the three-year-old Maria Teresa eldest daughter of the Infante Don Louie whom you saw appearing with Peary with curiosity at Goya at his easel and the group portrait has the regal posture of her distant Hoff's Berg ancestor Mariana of Austria yet there are touches of relaxed naturalism here while Maria Teresa on the right stands patiently dressed in finery as if to have her picture taken she has the breath of fresh air in her cheeks her arms are casually akimbo and her dog also strikes a very cute pose while Velazquez never seemed to paint a woman out of doors except on horseback boys landscape here is significant is as significant as Velasquez's interior setting with a framing curtain the mountains reinforce maria theresa's regal stature and the stone wall the finds are protected innocence while Goya Jewish salary from the court for painting tapestry cartoons he was finally appointed court painter in 1789 one of the requirements was to sue was to survey or inventory paintings in the royal collections what better education could there be in the art of Europe as well as Spain he would have seen paintings by Bosch Dirar Titian El Greco Rubens zurbarán Maria Velazquez Rivera I was struck by some of the aspects of Maria's painting at the Louvre the beggar from about 1650 huddled in a corner illuminated by the light from a window the street virgin is shown picking lice or fleas from his garment this painting has been in the French royal collection since 1782 so it is possible that Goya never saw it however the subject and compositional similarities with Goya is drawing in the M they are striking but the point of view is quite different the Goya drawing bears his caption it is summer and by moonlight they take the air and get rid of their fleas by touch vago is sympathy for adult beggars was sometimes strained his prints and drawings so the plight of poor children plentifully but here he turns the delousing process around it is moonlight that exposes the intimacy of this casual encounter this casual and carnal encounter Koya is of course well known for his use of the dream or vision as a conveyance to depict objects of the imagination he follows a Spanish literary tradition including Cervantes Don Quixote and Francisco Co Vado who in 1627 used the dream in Spanish sueño as its it as a satirical vehicle to take his reader on a tour of the underworld Spanish religious painting is full of pious saints who experience visions in 1629 francisco Zubrin painted the crucified st. peter who appears to st. peter nolasco who had founded an order in seville this apparition is vivid with the sense of heightened presence and attention to emotional realism that penetrates our space as well as the worshippers in the etching from the Caprichos what a tailor can do goriias apparition is the product of a hoax a tree draped in clerical Guard garb while flying witches clue us into the illusion nevertheless the contraption instills our and fright in the believers or is the child merely panicked by her mother's worshipful attention in Goya's flight of witches from the prado the point of view is ambiguous we are not sure whether the whole composition was made to frighten and delight us or are only the levitating figures of figment of the imagination of the scattering peasants below the drawing pesadilla particular particularly Spanish form of nightmare with a screaming witch riding a bull is clearly a figment a vision for Goya to contemplate or today's viewer to enjoy in Goya as well as in zurbarán the line between dream and reality illusion and delusion is permeable Antonio / ADA's dream of a knight was painted in about 1650 and is now in the Museum of the Royal Academy of San Fernando but Goya may have seen it in the collection of the prime-minister Godoy who owned it here a knight sleeps the still life on the table is an assembly of worldly treasures symbols of vanity and power the subject of his dream the angel warns him of the danger of dreaming of such ephemeral objects and Goya's print the warning to the dreamer and to the viewer is less clear a dichotomy occurs in the sleep of Reason produces monsters owls and bats symbolize dark and harmful forces which may cause harm if we do not apply reason to caution but the question can be asked is the artist being negligent or is his creative imagination at work in the drawing for this print the image was originally conceived as the title page of the series and it bears an early title for the series the words universal language drawn and by Francisco Goya in the year 1797 beneath the image is the caption the universe the author dreaming his one intention is to banish harmful beliefs commonly held and with this work of Capri chose to perpetuate the solid testimony of truth while Goya with his universal language always strive for universal universality just think of the relevance of his works today just about everything he did was in the Spanish vernacular born in Spain Jose de ribera spent most of his life in Naples calling himself the Spaniard his work is noted for the portrayal of deep emotional ism associated with religious experience however here he paints with startling objectivity a bearded woman named magdalena ventura scene inmate naples in 1640 Koya likely saw Rivera's painting and made his own version imparting a soft tenderness to the bond between mother and child aside from his Italian notebook and the prints after Velasquez this drawing may be the only example in which Goya acknowledges the work of another artist in connection to his own this comparison between Rivera's 1639 martyrdom of st. Philip and Goya is drawing of a tortured victim of the Inquisition is more typical of the connection between the work of both artists Rivera gives full expression to the Saints torture the gruesome effects of the hoist on naked limbs while the Saints face reveals both pain and a moment of spiritual transcendence the torturers explicit explicit actions are fully described giving the scene even greater credibility in the Royal Collection Koya may well have known this work however his si of drawings of a series of 29 drawings of victims of abuse and injustice exorcised by the Inquisition focuses as much on false and unreasonable charges as on the anguish and humiliation of the imprisoned in this drawing the expressive and seemingly violent brushstrokes emphasize the defilement of the body goriias caption one can't look in a rhetorical vein urges even further contemplation here we have two artists showing off on the left the famous self-portrait in the Louvre of the Spanish still-life painter Luis Melendez painted in 1747 just the year after Goya was born many of you would have seen this painting in an exhibition of his delectable still life works at the MFA in 2010 Melendez never served the court nor was he admitted in the Academy yet his confidence as he holds an academic drawing is forceful and magnetic coil on the other hand is a member of the Academy and his and is first court painter the painting is small but projects a presence disproportionate to its size the confidence is in the free and pure brushwork of color decorative fabric and above all light as it highlights the figure in the act of painting a large canvas these examples just cited are a brief indication of goiás response and awareness of the painting in his own country we saw in them a courtly austerity and an authenticity of expression that accuses his portraits deeply expressed emotions of religious piety and a fascination with the visionary come into play in his many depictions of the fantastic and imaginary humble low-class and deformed characters realistically depicted amply populate his drawings and paintings and finally a fascination with physical violence suffering and death pervades his mature work from 1778 on gorian subject matter is invariably Spanish life and experience including costume hairstyles customs diversions and current and past events this is a huge area and I will only focus on a few topics are familiar parasol although their roles are not quite certain in the parasol tapestry cartoon we see typical clothing of a male Maho and a highborn young woman his casual attire loose scarf and snood on his head are the mark of a young hipster while her fur lined jacket and modest blue bodice suggested demure member of a higher class dressed for an outing the young woman tossing in a blanket their plaything a straw mannequin dressed as a French dandy wear fashionable outfits for their Miller the Spanish countryside they were they wear short jackets employed embroidered skirts and headdresses and this is a sequence you'll see in the show Koya Koya as attire here is for a special occasion this painting he wears a fancy embroidered jacket with such as that one by bullfighters and he wears a hat indoors one that frames his head and adds height to his frame the candle holders in the brim possibly a means to test the effect of a particular painted you viewed by candlelight are an added adornment the Duchess of Alba dominating the landscape of her country estate in the south of Spain is dressed in typical Spanish fashion that even the Queen emulated in a portrait following this one the Duchess wears black lace and over skirt and shawl over a gold bodice and a black lace Monte ax the red sash was her father's military sash Koya was producing the Caprichos at the belt the same time he painted the Duchess of Alba not that they are fashion plates but thumbing through the Caprichos published in 1799 we see a range of Spanish attire from from judicial and clerical robes to the high waisted dress of a young bride about 15 years later in this painting called time borrowed from Lille two old women in sickness and decline still show off garments of their station in life one in traditional Spanish costume and the other in high French fashion the mirror says Cato what's happening they don't get it all is in a state of decay the old guard is passing soon to be swept away by the bloom of time Spanish customs games and diversions play a major role in Goya's work he examines work and occupations as a measure of men's and women's place in the world to a noble and demean life's pleasures provided Goya with ample raw material to target and illuminate human nature and experience he frequently revisited these themes using new forms and media sport games song and dance were part of the fabric of Spanish life enjoyed by all regardless of class age gender and skill further as the subject matter of an artist affiliated with the court and influenced by the enlightened ideas of the day they were seen by the court which commissioned them as evidence of a prosperous a prosperous society that had leisure I'm Gor also understood that through sport and play humans act out greater themes and that the contest of life supply the metaphor of art in Little Giants a Kappa Street cartoon from the prado young boys play a kind of leapfrog as one rises others descend their outfits suggest that the higher status of the one on top will hold in the Caprichos to rise into fall the powerful ascend and descend not according to rules of order such as class but by unruly forces in this case lust in the form of a satyr and this is a from from the Internet this is another group of little giants of today it's at a festival festival in Santander so gaurav's boys vision of large and small moments in Spanish history crops up throughout his work in all media the two monumental paintings in the Prado the second and third of May which commemorate the martyrdom of the Spanish people during the Peninsular war are a complex and layered version of a significant event painted at the end of the war the the prince known as the disasters of war mermaid were made during the French occupation of Spain with its attendant brutalities famine and political consequences in fact GAO's own title fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war against Napoleon tell the story better the ad prints done primarily in line in Qing and direct in Qing to produced home truly capture the full consequences of the war in physical and moral terms he pays special heed to the hue to the humiliation of the Spanish nation while addressing a very particular war that the Spanish called the war for independence perhaps more than any other work they have universal significance later in his life it was reported by a friend the play light the playwright Leandre Loire team in Bordeaux Koya says that he has fought bulls in his day and that with the sword in his hand he fears no one this may have been spoken nostalgically or figuratively but it does suggest that the fatal contest of men against brute force resonated for the artist the bull bull fight and imagery of the bull shown realistically or metaphorically as protagonist or prey prevailed in all media throughout Goya's lifetime published in 1816 the set of 33 prints known as the Toro Makia a Goya is it is idiosyncratic history of the bullfight in Spain in which he describes legendary and heroic feats of the matador and his team in etching and aquatint he highlighted key moments such as situating the origin of the bullfighting of the bullfight in the Spanish countryside when Bulls were captured by hunters or the time in 1527 when the emperor charles v appeared in the ring killing the bull with a single thrust of the lands and the moment when Pedro Romero the classic Matador of Goya's day killed a bull with quiet courage and a sword in Bordeaux at the end of his life Koya found a new means to depict that Spanish national sport using lithography which permitted him to draw freely on a stone Koya adopted a new point of view aimed at the French art market which perhaps saw things Spanish as exotic picturesque and barbaric here the emphasis is not on the artistry or athletic skill of the matador but on recklessness spectacle and violence finally there is a Spanish Inquisition tapping into the tenor of his time and place Koya also surveyed the controversies that's defined political discourse the meeting out of justice treatment of prisoners freedom of speech and the value of clergy and monasticism he viewed many of these problems through the prison of the Spanish Inquisition which for Goa and his enlightened contemporaries represented the obscurities beliefs and he new and inhumane procedures of the dark side of Spain while the Holy Office which had guarded Catholic orthodoxy against Jews Wars and heretics since the Middle Ages had already dispensed with certain practices often attributed to them Koya gives them currency as a vivid and dramatic signal to the Spanish conscience of his own day still in need of judicial reform the costumes paraphernalia and cruel techniques for extracting convention confessions were rich pictorial material and Goya resorted to them liberally in the Caprichos the etching and Aquitaine titled that dust Koya ridicules the practices of the Inquisition as evidence of one of the vulgar deceptions allowed by custom one of Goya's most stringent and poignant treatments of the Inquisition is the sequence of 30 drawings depicting wheel and theoretical victims solitary figures who while subjected to torture and humiliation maintain dignity executed at a time during political debate on the revival of the Inquisition which had been prohibited under king joseph bonaparte these drawings can also be viewed as part of a virtual series in Goya's era a history of pain and suffering at the hands of the powerful frederick will now take over hand you over to him and he'll give you Gore within the context of European art so a Stefanie is demonstrated with many parallels to works by Spanish artists gore was clearly deeply Spanish and character deeply Spanish in his artistic theme such as topics like the bullfight and and even when he seems to play against his own traditions it is telling that Goya reacts to Spanish art and culture and does not simply ignore it but let's think a bit for a while of how boy is not specifically Spanish okay and the first thing of course in the bookends of his career remember it's worth recalling that the most spanish of artists didn't live out his days in spain he dies in 1828 in Bordeaux France and he lives the last four years of his life and this great drawing crazy skates is drawn in Bordeaux and a part of the real explosion of fascinating imagery he does in these private albums late in his career but also the other bookend of goiás career that is the start doesn't take place in Spain either it takes place in Italy it's a key moment in his life about two years 1769 to 71 it's a self-study trip which he basically funds himself that is he scrapes gathered the money to go to Rome and travel around Italy to take his art up to the next level to see the greatest examples and meet the greatest greatest examples from the past and meet the greatest artists of the day and learn from them and a very precious volume in the Italian sketchbook was kept at this time and in fact this is the pages with the listings of the births of his children he also mentions his marriage his later mid moved to Madrid these are things so it's a combination of a sketchbook drawings of things he sees in Italy but also then he holds on to it as a record of key events really landmark milestones in his life this is a wonderful here is a list it's basically his itinerary of all the different cities in Italy he either is going to visit or has visited but the key thing is he says but the most important are Parma Venice Bologna Genoa and Kona I don't know how in Kona made the list but anyway this is a list of places that he felt were the most important parts of his education his syllabus as it were and also the sketchbook shows us some of his favourite paintings this is fondant genoa says mentioning a very important you know big a big painting in Venice and grunt quadruped a little better and a say so a large painting by Paolo Veronese a you assume one of those large feast pictures like the wedding feast at Cana or the feast house of Levi so these are things he scenes sees in Parma etc that he held up as great great works of art that were essential to study if one were to be a great artist of a new generation he's also looking at classical art that is the sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome and making several studies the torso Belvedere II this famous Hellenistic it's a fragment it's really just a torso and upper thighs of this vast gigantic figure but full of power that so I'm informed and inspired later artists he's studying this from several different sizes he's understanding it's not a flat thing but rather a sculpture that exists in three dimensions and well he's there in in Italy he takes part in a competition held by the Academy of Fine Arts in Parma in Emilien central Italy and we have one of the oil sketches in our show and this is so 1771 very young artist he's just just getting going now he doesn't win the competition this is the final you can see the oil sketch in the exhibition here in Boston is very rokoko dainty figures pastel colors kind of dappled effects by the time he gets to the final painting which is own bias foundation in Spain figures become much more solid now the subject is Hannibal upon seeing Italy for the first time from the Alps okay Hannibal the great Carthaginian conquer looking down off the Alps towards Italy who is about to conquer now the cannibal comes through from Africa through Spain and Spaniards like to think of themselves in the terms of Hannibal and it's a kind of great assignment if you're a Spaniard right you're looking at Italy for the first time you're going to conquer it you're gonna make it go ahead in some ways rises to the challenge he gets a commendation they approve of his entry in the competition but he doesn't win but that was enough to give him new confidence and he was able to tell people back in Spain and he'd been to Italy and his old work had been admired and by the way the sketchbook pages I showed you just a minute ago seems that Goya was in the habit of writing lots of things down not just making drawings but also events in his life and it's tempting to think that there are other little notebooks somewhere out there that will be discovered in future years now Koya this painting was you know aimed in an Italian audience and here's a general indebtedness to Italian tradition and Stephanie showed you earlier a whole slew of comparisons to work by specific Spanish artists I'm going to show you some non Spanish artists one of the big ones would be T Apollo Jon batiste it's the upload the Venetian painter who of course works in Madrid comes to Spain for the last part of Kapos career right when Roy is indeed starting out as a young man this is a famous fresco of 1762 in the Royal Palace in Madrid the grandest building in Madrid the subject is the wealth and benefits to Spain under King Charles a third so glorifying the monarchy sort of thing that chap lo had done so well in Italy and in Germany and then brings to Spain also showing a predilection for very confident ceiling painting a full wholehearted belief in allegory and certainly the kind of artist who could please the powerful boy himself was a fresco painter and that's important to remember this is a tip low oil sketch in our collection at the MFA you can see it on the second floor the Evans wing it's the Virgin receiving the prayers of Saint Dominic so a small sketch done somewhere between a drawing and a painting done to obtain permission from the patron but also to work out your idea so you could then scale it up to a large format and put it on the wall of a building this was the Church of the Gesu Otte in Venice so as I said the Virgin receiving the prayers of Saint Dominic and this is a sketch by Goya and it's actually pretty similar the idea was for this is for a half of a cupola that it's half of a dome similarly high up off the ground and this sketch is in the exhibition for the famous Church of San Antonio de la Florida a small church with in Madrid what some of Boyce most beautiful really just works and that's a sketch right there again something between a drawing and painting a way of proving to your patron what he or she is going to get but also to work up your ideas and figure out just what you're going to want to do when you can take it up to the large scale also there's some mysterious things in Goya that may have a parallel if not a precedence you know not sure exactly what he knew of tlo's but this great drawing in the exhibition of apparently weightless figures it's called it's inscribed to earth and they seem to be floating and dancing in the middle of the air having a grand old time it's a strange thing where's the ground how far off the ground are they what's propelling them what keeps them up then it's an interesting parallel in an earlier this is a late drawing by Goya 1820 sometime around 1750 this is chapel oh he is etching of these dwarves and puppies who also seem to propel themselves no sense of the ground to be high high up in a new sense of buoyancy but Italian art and classical antiquity runs through everything even in its most unlikely guises this is one of the most brew of the images in the disasters of war and the subject is called titles called this is worse implying that the one on the previous page which was bad as it was this is indeed a whole nother level worse and you can see it's a dismembered body it's been stuck up in a spiky tree there's fighting going on or probably prisoners being rounded up in the background but of course this isn't an artist who's watching these bodies necessarily in the aftermath of fighting but rather this is an artist who's thinking about the sort of dignity of the dismembered body and looking at things like the torso Belvedere day which I showed you before and his patron is down a notebook in the upper left and then the beautiful powerful back of the far nazy Hercules another sculpture he would have known in person and indeed drew right here so the most terrific moments he's going back to classical sculpture indeed seeking the eternal as a way of doing some dignity or humanity on the victims of war now let's think a bit about sources from places that go I did not travel things he might have seen in the form of prints or drawings or other paintings or even heard described and you know we've got go I had a number of very famous series of prints but the two most famous ones are the Caprichos 1799 and then the disasters of war which were worked on from 1810 to 1814 but not published until 1863 long after his death when they would not be so controversial and perhaps more commercially appealing when the war is now long past and what I'm showing you on the screen is a scene by callow the plundering of a large farmhouse and etching from 1663 so much much earlier about a hundred and fifty years earlier that this is these are prints made a response to the 30 Years War the French artist Jacques Kahlo made two series of etchings documenting harshness and military life in wartime and the impact of the war on the populace now the key thing is these activities are no less brutal than what Goya shows you but they're not nearly as heavy-hitting there's so much going on we've taken a step back a lot of incidental detail and it doesn't quite convey the human cost as well or at least as quickly as immediately and it's likely that Goya knew these sets of prints by Kahlo the most well well-known being the 18 etchings which are called the miseries and misfortunes of war which as I said published in 1633 and while kalos series are considered to be detailed documents they're very specific with incidents it's hard not to see them in polemical terms as an expose of destruction disorder and mayhem and Goya takes a close-up look at the kinds of atrocities that Kelo depicts at a distance and he provides intense focus on the pain and this one is called this print from the disaster is called how it happens and it shows the plundering of churches well a cleric there cowers in fear he may have been wounded as well as these soldiers seem to mark off with all the all the silver plate and the treasures of this church or convent now let's think about a bit about England we have a very beautiful famous painting upstairs by Joseph Wright of Derby and it totally plugs into the strong English preference going way back to subjects that are haunting or mysterious or melancholy what we might think of as the poetry of painting this is Joseph Wright of Derby of Darby's 1771 it's a painting of a grotto by the seaside in Naples near Naples with bandits okay so these are bandits here but they're very classical looking they're kind of wearing ancient Roman armor there's a very dignity and great dignity of them the most beautiful haunting light coming through this the figures are small the cave is large it's about this ideal of the sublime forces greater than us and of course in bow and Bude with mystery and then this is a painting little one by Goya which is kind of fascinating it's about 30 or 40 years later vagabonds in a cave much smaller doesn't have the grand pretensions but totally plugs into that same idea of mystery of melancholy who are these people are these we call the vagabonds but are they guerrilla fighters are they smugglers who really knows but the same of effective light bathing over these mysterious figures in as they huddled in their cave so potentially a kind of thing in English strain you might see or might call within boys art more England is another English predilection not so much that for melancholy mystery and poetry but rather that for satire and this is Gil Reitz cockney sportsman there on the left you can see has not really clear who's going to get hurt here for the birds are the hunters and they of course look exotic and what's amazing these are exactly contemporary 1800 on the left and the one on the right the page from the Caprichos in 1799 and it says the title here in the Goya Capriccio edging is all will fall the the point being that there's a very sort of pretty girl female bird and that's a decoy and she's snares men who who can't really control themselves put through their lest they go up and they get caught and then they get disemboweled and plucked or their feathers down here so the point the inevitability of stupid male action is the idea and the figure the upper left who is going pretty willingly towards the decoy bird that actually has goiás features it's a self-portrait so he's kind of a sucker too but you can see again in both cases using a hunting metaphor to get at a broader point or to think also the more Gilray this is kind of fun on the left it's called menthe that that the Gilroy English one is monstrous cross and it says Treasury there and so these people are eating with their big mouths sort of ladles Falls of coins so it's eating up the coins of the Treasury of the English of the English economy in a sense so it's a this banquet scene is one of explaining political greed now the the Goya which is not that many years later shows it says the in the final edition the print says estime calientes or they are hot and the idea is that so these are the these are priests and they're eating big appetites but it's hot in the sense of being kind of turned on right this is a it's an analogy of sort of greed for food and then sort of sexual greed and on that corruption etc so it's a nice kind of parallel here English gluttony and Spanish gluttony similarly arranged to make political points this extends also to another English tradition which is that of group portraiture two examples the MFA John Singleton Copley on the Left Benjamin West on the right now we think of Benjamin West Johnson completes American but they wound up in Britain that was their latter part of their careers and they very much attached themselves to British conventions but these ideas of informally posed group portraits right people aren't lined up rigidly it's not the kind of stiff team picture effect but people it's like in a sort of an afternoon of family interactions being captured by a particularly attentive painter that's the kind of goal here and these kind of portraits would preserve a sense of informality and a comfortable assemblage of people in a family or their family in a household showing the relationship between the figures yet while the same time giving them individuality and this type of tradition even if growing and never went to england and may not have even seen a painting firsthand he would have known of prints or descriptions drawings made after these paintings by their artists and those kind of these kind of informal group portraits help explain the early masterpiece the family of Don Luis from 1784 with its relaxed and convivial mood of the family the brother of the king it's a huge painting of course that greets you at the beginning of the show France as well of course and I just want to show briefly this is Jerico his famous lithograph of the boxers 1818 focusing on male bravado within the realm of popular culture and this is the kind of thing that very well boy may have seen and would have inspired him and when Goa is in Bordeaux France the last four years of his life he wants to make an artistic splash with his bullfight bullfighting lithographs the famous Bulls of Bordeaux this is a term Bulls Oh Bordeaux only applied later but they're done in board over there four of them they're big figures and they may seem to have been intended for a French audience that is an audience that would admire the azadus ISM of Spanish culture of skull want to buy acquire these but also French audience that would have been sophisticated understood that lithography was a new medium with all sorts of expressive possibilities and we have for impressions within the exhibition very fine ones on loan to us from the Worcester Art Museum just very beautiful come this is a great one the so-called faire famous American I Mexican Matador here who was attacking Abel while riding another one so this was quite a feat and this the sort of remarkable memorable event you'd want to celebrate in a large format lithograph so now I'd like to walk you quickly through a few highlights of the exhibition and the exhibition I should remind you that we'll be only shown in Boston so we have a strong beginning with going out looking at himself and the first room is devoted to self-portraits it gives us a chance to observe his changing physical appearance as he ages and also is changing fashion and is changing artistic style across the course of his life and this first room offers important chronological structure in a show that is otherwise not arranged year by year and this is a small picture it's tiny compared to how large it is on the screen 1795 those small and is a great presence and you see him silhouetted against a huge window with a strong grid that I feel anticipates Mondrian he's shown in the act of painting it's a kind of performance himself he's wearing a bullfighters jacket as Stephanie pointed out he's standing alertly and elegantly a kind of pose there holds palette and brushes and he's wearing that improbable hat a top hat with a with a attach the ribbon being a set of candle holders the point being apparently that you could judge a painting best by candlelight but wouldn't you think it would set your head on fire so just a few years later we have the famous frontispiece now this is again in the same room of the exhibition from 1799 this is that this is the first edging and the set of famous 80 prints that satirize human society and behavior and he's announcing himself here to a broad array of intellectuals but kind of upper middle class people who would buy these prints it's interesting though that this is that a prince but he says pintor he identifies himself as a painter here painter being a higher status occupation you see him in profile he presents us himself to us with perhaps just a touch of arrogance boy is a man of many hats and this is a drawing which hangs next to it in the show shows about a decade younger he's dressed in her earlier style tricorn hat you know it's an 18th century at not a new 19th century hat he's observant in his expression and the vocab it's a drawing in pen not a print the previous one was a print this is a pen drawing and brown in brown ink but it's a linear of Oh cabinets of lines and doubts suggesting that it might have been preparatory for an etching a print that was never made but this first room here displaying goiás chosen media of paintings prints and drawings is also the types of close connections across media and across decades that we want to make throughout the show the show is not arranged chronologically and we don't separate drawings in one room prints in another room paintings in the third everything is integrated as we believe Koya thought of it himself the second room one of the great ones we're calling that life studies and we've placed portraits in nearly all the rooms of the show to demonstrate how portraiture which Goya gave which gave Goya steady income and good clients for his whole career how that portraiture informed his approach the human body and we have a focus here on the life cycle the focus we go from childhood to old age and we have this is the kind of painting that really shows the gamut of works in the show in terms of their fame we have some things from private collections that are not well known at all we've got things that have been never-before-seen in North America they've been brought 15 different works been brought to North America for the first time in our exhibition other things though in an exhibition you want to see a few famous or ideally many famous works things that help remind you how this artist fits into your mental map of the history of art nothing is better than this little manual asorio 1788 comes to us on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York little Manuela Sawyer's in a red jumpsuit he's a boy in command of his little kingdom there at the left there are three cats with watchful eyes big go eyes and they're looking girl II at a magpie who holds in his beak a calling card it's a pet magpie being held by a string but he's holding a calling card with Goya's name on it so it's a very inventive signature and as we saw with a solo Goya in the Duchess of Alba Gauri has very clever signatures again and again in the exhibition we're comparing Manuel asorio a little boy of the 18th century with Victor G who's part of a new century he's a 19th century boy he's about 6 or 7 years old he's a nephew of one of the most important French generals part of the occupying forces he comes to us from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and so we contrast these two up-to-date fashioned high collar military influenced dress and not holding a toy but a book other side of the life sequence of course is a section on aging and this bitter print from the Caprichos called a solemn Huerta or until death it's a satire old woman's attempt to cling to her youth through up-to-date French fashion these Styles are just too youthful to for her she doesn't really carry it off she's looking in the mirror but she can't see the truth that she has grown old and her servants are tittering and scoffing in the background as they roll their eyes about a dozen years after this print though boy it takes the idæan blows it up to a monumental oil painting this is a large picture of time which came to us from Lille in northern France and in order to obtain this painting we are very lucky that we're an encyclopedic Museum and the very same museum and the musee des bois are in lille happened to want to do right now a major exhibition on a Middle Kingdom Egyptian pharaoh exactly so if you've wandered over the southeast portion of this building you know that we have plenty of such material and so the timing was very propitious for a loan exchange 12 objects from us one Goya from them them now we see these two women truly decrepit and diseased it's an aristocrat on the right and her companion as Stephanie pointed out French dress on the right dress on the right Spanish national dress on the left and they look into a mirror and the label the mirrors labelled Kate owl how is it going or maybe how do I look that's what you'd say when you put on a dress adèle what do you think of this and it's clear it's not looking too good at all um they seem no more aware of their condition than the woman in the print and they're still oblivious to the looming figure of father time who comes not with a scythe but with a broom to sweep them away perhaps the most innovative room in the exhibition is the fourth room and this was one of Stephanies many great ideas devoted to imbalance and we've got the matador opinioni who's perfectly poised as the bull runs underneath him notice how the shadows of the matador and the bull are unified I mean they're perfect equilibrium a more traditional exhibition would have noted on several different labels that isn't it interesting that Goya seems to return again and again to the theme of balance and imbalance well we're doing something new we're having a gallery devoted entirely to that subject matter and so we see this is the print that heralds the entrance and announces this is the room of imbalance and then inside this great pair of drawings both from our collection which was in fact the germ of the whole exhibition a number of years ago the gave Stephanie the idea both in our collection about a dozen years apart on the Left ice-skaters it's a sunny winter's day they're tottering and teetering notice other hands are pretty high up but they're all more or less in order then on the right is a drawing from Bordeaux and the crayon drawings of his last year three or four years of his life and this is a different kind of skating this one is not ice skating but roller skating it's a newfangled invention and in fact the inscription says they're locos patinas or crazy skates and the idea being you know is just a crazy invention or would this drive one mad have you tried to do this and but there's so much in this comparison right here and not putting them in different rooms because they come from different periods but putting them next to each other in the exhibition makes clear that balance and the loss of equilibrium were key themes to Goya because where's the people on the left are doing so pretty well the one on the right he's going to take a huge tumble and it's amazing precarious moment and you particularly see it it is open mouth at his hair flying behind him in this look of sheer terror now the portrait room dominated of course by the Duchess of Alba 1797 is the painting with the marvellous solo goin signature our exhibition is only the third time this has ever left the Hispanic society so it's a truly we're very privileged to have this elegant woman with us for a few more months but I'd like to show her now her husband who's the duke of alba one of our prized loans from the Prado in Madrid all told we were able to borrow 10 paintings and 11 drawings from the Prado and we've reunited husband and wife for the first for the first time since the early years of the 19th century now she's really impressive but he's not so bad he hasn't he hasn't taken off his riding boots and his spirit Spurs are still visible right there he leans in nonchalantly against a keyboard instrument an early version of the grand piano and he holds in his hands the sheet music of Haydn the next room contrasted with all these beautifully dressed people is the almost entirely nude st. John the Baptist this is a painting from 1810 and it is the kind of entrance the calling card to a room of spirituality and dreams and religion like the Duke of Alba this port this painting has never been before to America and we're grateful to the Prado for that the overall room we're using the rubric other worlds other states and it's dedicated to religion superstition witchcraft and insanity so I mean I mean if portraiture is what made Goya famous in his day this next room is what makes Goya famous das this painting is an unusual take on st. John the Baptist he's not a haggard figure who's lived years in the wilderness here is a healthy young man straight out of the baroque paintings of Caravaggio or perhaps murió showing faith is exemplified by purity and innocence we contrast him with the drawing of the hermit in prayer it's in a private collection and by contrast this brush drawing shows religious devotion bordering on extreme sacrifice and and it's quite something to see these two Hermits in the wilderness right next to each other different in time period and in medium and certainly expression but they're the same subject matter and that shows Goya's range the other side of the coin of Christian devotion superstition and witchcraft and we have the famous witches Sabbath from the Lasser Galliano Museum in Madrid you see the devil in the form of a large goat it was accepting the offerings of infants both dead and alive from a circle of witches is a crescent moon and upper left very and then all these wonderful atmospheric bats above the head of the goat and the striking painting was made to satisfy a taste among certain aristocrats were supporters of Goya and they loved the macabre and their cult now to borrow this little painting from the museum in Spain we had to offer them a quote visiting masterpiece we gave them a choice of four and they picked a vengo vengo landscape so that is just finishing up its visit to Madrid and they were thrilled to have post-impressionist masterpiece there and of course we're thrilled to have this anchoring our selection of witchcraft now the room other worlds other states also addresses that the theme of dreams and as you've seen before one of the most famous images of dreaming in all of Western art is Goya sleep of Reason 1799 because it's part of the set of the Capri chose the sueño de la razón it says there produces monsters an artist asleep in a studio or creatures of the night owls bats and a big Lynx it's a Lynx down there with the big eyes again the large glowing eyes encroach upon the artists space and his mind and a Stephanie earlier explained sueño can be translated two ways sueño meaning sleep sleep of reason meaning that when we're not vigilant dark forces will overtake us or sueño can be translated as dream meaning that when an artist dreams the true inner imagination is unleashed so a negative interpretation and a very positive one and of course Goya is fascination with dreams and nightmares anticipates the 20th century art of the Surrealists now the next room is devoted to history particularly the disorder of war and injustice perpetrated by institutions this is a small painting from around 1810 the attack on a military camp comes from a private collection they're owned by an aristocrat in Madrid who's inherited the painting all the way down in the family since it was obtained from Goya in his own time so it's been in the family for 200 years it's a small horrific painting much smaller in person than on the screen but it shows an imaginary scene this is not going as in a war reporter and we see a stream of emotions from mercy to fear to ruthless aggression and another thing we're very proud of is showing a comparison of a print from this series the disasters of war with corpses Bob piled up the subjects called all this and more 18:10 and then the painting the still life of golden bream 1808 to 1812 now the similarity the sort of haphazard way the human bodies have been piled up in the fish or palette up this similarity and its kind of brutality has been noted before in the literature but this is the first time these two works have been placed side-by-side in an exhibition now other victims are those of institutions particularly the Spanish Inquisition that it accused many not so much in goiás time but in previous generations with sacrilege in the form of sorcery sorcery and witchcraft and we saw this comparison before but to give you a little more about the subject matter on the Left a print from the Capriccio as a figure on the platform above my disordered mob of monks and clerics whose hearing the charges being read against him of using quote specks of dust that means potions to make materials to create potions so he's clearly a magician evil and must be punished the one in the rites even more poignant it's a brush drawing from 1811 and it shows a man in the caption says for having no legs then the man has been accused of sorcery since he was able to be present at two places at once right must have traveled there magically despite having no legs so the absurdity of these charges is something of course the Goya rails against now we wanted to begin the show with the grand painting and a group of self-portraits we wanted to end equally ambitiously in the last room we're calling solo Goa that is only Goya after the famous inscription that the Duchess of Alba is pointing down to in the sand and it's a pretty bold attempt we admit to sum up the characteristics of goiás creativity and greatness now one of the key characteristics in Goa is his wish to tackle grand themes such as the longing for redemption it's a very human wish and going again is also in terms of other grand themes fascinated by life and death in the boundary between the two of them we've got a pair right here and this pair of paintings are the two large format works in the final room one of the two the first one is the boys last altarpiece and perhaps his most moving work of religious art and this comes from a church in Madrid in a kind of in a school and a very quiet neighborhood in Madrid that's never been to North America before to get this painting for the exhibition we appeal to a higher power and we were able to involve Cardinal Sean O'Malley who wrote a very eloquent letter about the importance of bringing this huge painting to Boston and this shows st. Joseph of Calais Anne's right there who is taking communion at the very end of his life he's surrounded by devoted pupils and teachers of the schools that he had founded and there's a wonderful similarity in palette and in the play of expressive hands from this painting with one done by Goya just year later very small but equally move it much smaller this one but equally moving the self-portrait with dr. Arrieta that was 1819 as 1820 the next year after recovering from a fatal near fatal illness oh I thank the physician who saved him with this moving double portrait the artist and his doctor noticed the contrast of the hands and the faces this left hand of the doctor holding up the body of holding up Goya so he can take the medicine the left is care the right hand holding the medicine would be cure the contrast of the pale face and the healthy one and poor Goya there his hands barely able to clutch the bed covers so very expressive been moving and it's significant that the big inscription at the bottom remember with Goya inscriptions and signatures are so significant it refers to dr. Arrieta not as his physician but as his friend the friend who saved his life like the altarpiece with the giving of the bread the sick this ostensibly secular painting seems sacramental as well as the cup of medicine of course invokes the wine of the mass and furthermore this ostensibly secular painting also recalls in its composition and the way that one body cradles the other a deep tradition of religion imagery like images of the Good Samaritan or even the Pieta now the final grouping in the entire exhibition is devoted to another one of Goya's great themes which is the transitory nature of power and Stephanie shown you before this game The Little Giants 1792 this is a design for a tapestry and you see there's a curvature of the earth right implying that sometimes people are on top and there's subjugating others but this happens everywhere around the world and the ephemeral and universal nature of power and indeed its limitations is emphasized in other works this is the same print to rise into fall one day the power falls on top next day they may fall right again the curvature the earth implying the universality of this and also the hollowness of power we see that in this this late print apparently a terrifying figure here as soldiers at the right stumble to get away from this looming apparition but this phantom is really just a hoax to giant cost you manipulated by people inside there's a little head peeking out there so in a way the only thing you have to fear of course is fear itself the exhibition ends with yet another giant now seated again on the edge of the earth this is a pure aquatint so it's not an etching it's all made in tone not lines there are only six impressions in the world and this impression here is one of the treasures of the printed collection of the MFA and we thought it very important to have the last work in the show and emphasize to emphasize Goya's devotion to printmaking that the last work be a print and also one from our own collection this giant though is not just banished but also Universal he's a he may appear powerful this looming figure as he sits on the edge of the earth but at the same time he is conflicted he might even seem paralyzed looking back over his shoulder trapped between order and disorder thank you you

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 72,111

Keywords: Francisco Goya (Visual Artist), Art, Painting, Drawing, Prints, Spanish, Spain, Spanish People (Ethnicity)

Id: xZ9WNFV4ggM

Length: 82min 5sec (4925 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 17 2014