This video contains images which some viewers may find distressing.
In December 1813, Ferdinand VII was back in power in Spain. He declared
himself absolute monarch, abolished the Constitution, and began taking even more
repressive measures against the liberal forces in his country.
Between 1810 and 1820, Goya was working on 'The Disasters of War', a series of 82 aquatint
etchings which take up after May the 3rd 1808, except with that painting, it was perfectly clear
who were the bad guys and who were the good. But these etchings were much more ambiguous
and more confrontational. They are as hard, if not harder to look at, than his 'Black Paintings'.
Spain was under French occupation and Goya was 62 when he began working on the
etchings in secret. He would finish them under the rule of Ferdinand VII but they
wouldn't get published until 35 years after Goya died. As he denounces both violence and
abuse of power, it would have been impossible to publish them while Ferdinand was still alive.
The artist takes the concepts of patriotism heroism and Triumph and turns them on their head.
He had personally lived through this, seen many of these atrocities with his own eyes and he tells
us so. Here it says "Yo Lo Vi" ("I have seen this"). He saw people starving to death on the streets, executions
and assaults. Controversially, he is saying that the Spanish can be just as cruel and sadistic as the French.
Goya boldly refuses to take sides, and that was something we'd never seen before.
We can divide the etchings into three groups: The early ones are works about the Napoleonic Invasion, the second
group concerned the famine that followed, in this etching the upper-class man cruelly mimics the
beggar, and then the final group documents Spain's move towards absolutism and satirise the church.
Here a priest walks on a frayed and tattered rope, as a woman cries: "The Rope is Breaking!"
In Goya's original sketch for the print, the precarious crossing was made by the pope, but in
a rare act of self-censorship, Goya downgrades him! For the most part the etchings transcend
specifics, Goya's work is universal because it has deep compassion for all victims of war, and
an understanding of suffering which affects all of us - and is at the heart of our Humanity.
Here A Lone Survivor is faced with a world of devastation,
destruction and suffering and he cries out in desperation: "There is no one to help them!"
On the restoration of Ferdinand VII, Goya received no more commissions, and at the age of 73 had to
accept that his days were numbered in monarchist Spain. Disillusioned, he moved outside of Madrid to a
farmhouse, and lived here in near isolation for the next four years. Left alone in the dark he created monsters.
He set about producing an extraordinary cycle of 14 Works, painted directly onto the
wallpaper of the two floors of his house. Goya lived and worked like a Hermit, and we don't even
know what he called them, as he never mentioned them, signed them, or titled them, and nobody else saw them.
The paintings were photographed in situ in 1874 before they were removed,
and thanks to these images, we have a record of where they were and what condition they were in.
There's more than one way to look at these paintings. I think the Deafness/Madness angle has
been overstated. He had been deaf for over 30 years at this point, and there is no evidence of Madness
in his letters or elsewhere. We have to see them in the context of political and religious turmoil.
These are paintings by an old tired man, stripped of his status and wealth, disappointed and angry
with the world, and desperate to express it in the only way he knows how... in paint.
We can see the passage of Goya's disillusionment over the years, in this one image.
THIS painting is the exact same subject matter painted by Goya 30 years previously. They show
the feast of Saint Isadora which takes place every 15th of May. When Goya painted it in 1788
it is full of light and joy, but 30 years later that world had become a nightmare.
30 years which saw the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the occupation of Spain and
the horrendous guerrilla warfare that followed, the extension of the Inquisition, and the restoration
of a dictator King. The earlier painting commissioned for a princess is a celebration,
full of young people dancing and drinking. The later version is the exact same scene but the
sky has turned from glorious sunshine to dark and stormy. Where once the revellers sang along to
brass bands, the source of the music is now a lone madman. The once orderly crowd are now a seething
mass of madness, no longer laughing but howling in agony - and the reason for their pain is right in
the middle of the mass of bodies staring out at us... Napoleon Bonaparte. 20 other political figures have
been identified in Goya's Black paintings, this to me seems to contradict the belief
that the paintings had no real meaning or were purely the product of goya's psychiatric decline.
in 1863 the house was bought by Baron d'Erlanger.
He had goya's paintings, along with the wallpaper peeled from the walls, and then
transferred onto canvas. If you've ever tried to strip wallpaper you know how impossible
that delicate task would have been. Many of the details were lost and sections had to be
repainted by restorers - and some were purposely altered for aesthetic reasons, as we shall see.
This is a good example. If we look at the photo from before the painting was removed, we see
that the original was much wider. The restorer has seen fit to remove the sides of the canvas,
ignoring that Goya often used empty space for dramatic effect. This changes the work's centre
of balance and positions the woman in white nearer the middle of the composition, and so
shifts the focus of the painting. The he-goat or Satan, preaches from a small mound. His mouth
is wide open, giving instructions to the old crones around him. He is dressed as a priest,
which makes an obvious anti-clerical statement. He is surrounded by obsequious women with bestial
twisted faces, thought to be witches. Spain was simultaneously marked by the enlightenment,
fervent Catholicism, and a widespread belief in the Supernatural. Most people believed in witches.
As we saw Goya has used witchcraft imagery before in Los Caprichos, and in a similarly
themed painting 30 years earlier, he also featured a he-goat surrounded by a ring of terrified women.
Goya's use of tenebrism throughout the black paintings was popularised by the 17th century
Spanish artist José de Ribera, whom Goya admired as well as his hero Rembrandt who used tenebrism
to heighten dramatic effect. The woman in white looks suspiciously like a nun. The way she is
separate from the others suggests she is a new initiate into the coven. This is a dangerous
painting. Remember the Inquisition is still in operation as Goya was painting these images.
The he-goat and his followers are the very antithesis of reason and enlightened thinking
and this is a bitter critique of a church that would often condemn ideas about science
as 'subversive' and accuse enlightened thinkers of being 'agents of the devil'.
In parts of Spain, fights where opponents can club each other to death, was still
allowed in Goya's day. They are beating the life out of each other. The man on
the left is covered in blood, and the man on the right is shielding his face.
As they smash each other to a pulp they slowly sink into quicksand - or do they?
We know substantial changes were made after removal, and the original photo shows that Goya had painted
the fighters standing in high grass rather than knee-deep in mud. Either way, I think we
can see that the scene of brutal and pointless violence is an allusion to the upheaval in Spain,
a picture of tribalism, of a country tearing itself apart. Goya is saying: "THIS is Spain".
This is Goya's interpretation of a mythological subject 'The Moirai' or the sisters of Fate from
classical literature. On the left is 'Clotho', the youngest sister. She is usually seen spinning the
thread of life, but Goya has her holding a newborn baby. 'Lachesis', the second sister, holds a looking
glass, ready to inspect the thread of life. And 'Altropos', the eldest sister is carrying scissors
which she will use to either cut the thread of life or not. Goya has added a fourth figure not
featured in the myth, a man with his hands tied behind his back. Is this Goya? Helpless to his
fate? Controlled by outside forces and unable to stop what is going on around him?
I think, the peculiar replacement of Clotho's spinning tool with a baby, holds a more personal meaning.
Goya and his wife had at least eight children, but only one survived into adulthood. Their married
life was plagued by dozens of miscarriages and infant deaths. In classical mythology, the sisters
of Fate are said to appear three nights after a child's birth to determine the course of its life.
Clotho presides over the moment we are born, and the baby she is holding is still attached by the
thread of life, but unfortunately by the time we get to Altropos, the thread of life has already
been cut - the baby's fate is decided, and the fourth figure, possibly Goya, can do nothing to help.
As I said before, Goya didn't sign any of his black paintings or title them. This one was named by
his friend Antonio Brugada, and is also known by its alternative name 'Fantastic Vision'.
In Jewish Legend Asmodeus was the prince of demons in Hell. The main focus here is on the two floating
figures, one male and one female. They both seem terrified. She covers her face, and is looking in
the opposite direction, as if they are being chased. He points to the town at the top of the mountain,
possibly the Rock of Gibraltar, which was a refuge for Spanish liberals during the aftermath of the
peninsula war. The crowd, with horses and wagons appear to be refugees running from danger.
In the foreground, facing the figures are the French army we saw in 'The 3rd of May 1808',
taking aim at the defenseless crowd seeking refuge in Gibraltar.
This is the most famous of 'The Black Paintings', the most horrific, and the most discussed.
I think the first thing to say, is that it is probably more shocking to us, than it was to
the 19th century Spanish. We have to see it in the context of the rise of Romanticism,
and its obsession with the supernatural, which led to the rise of the Gothic novel and the popularity
of entertainment such as Phantasmagoria, popular at the time with audiences in Madrid, where images
of monsters and ghoulish subject matter were projected in theatres using lanterns.
Having said that, the cannibalism angle is particularly grotesque, and it's even
more horrifying that Goya painted it on the walls of his dining room!
The story is from the mythological tale of the Greek god Kronos, the Romans called him Saturn.
In it, Saturn overthrew his father to become the ruler of all the Gods, but was afraid that history
would repeat itself, so he ate or rather swallowed whole, five out of his six children. But here,
Saturn is not swallowing the body, but gnawing down on it, in a frenzied and horrific attack.
It has been tackled before by artists, but Goya's version is different. It is not a baby's body as in
the myth and other paintings, but a grown adult's, which makes it even more disturbing, and we can
back that up with this incredible 1797 sketch, which clearly shows it was intended to be an adult.
Saturn's expression is terrifying, this is not a God revelling in Revenge - as Gods do.
It is not a celebration. Saturn is shocked by his own monstrousness, he is aware of just how terrible an
act he commits against his own flesh and blood - but he just can't stop himself - and that is horrifying.
The raw flesh of the figure, is the flesh that Goya witnessed all over Madrid, as innocent
citizens were cut down in the street by armed men. Poverty and hunger left a mass of starving bodies
in the city, and piles of corpses were left to rot. Goya has seen hell on Earth, and he described
what he saw for future Generations. But mostly (I think), this is a painting about 'power' and just
how far someone will go to retain power. How Saturn, like Ferdinand, has used power not only
to mistreat his own citizens (hence the adult body), but also to violently turn on those people.
Those in power will use any means possible to hang on to that power - including eating their own children.
For me, the most powerful image is not Satan devouring his son, but 'The Drowning Dog', the most
pessimistic and most wretched image of them all. It shows a dog's head gazing upwards, lost in the
vastness of the rest of the image, alone, terrified, and drowning in quicksand. The image is made more
poignant by the fact that Goya loved dogs and wrote about them often in his letters.
We have seen horrific images before, in many paintings. But usually, no matter how ghastly there is salvation.
In the black paintings, there is no sense that the sacrifice of human life is going to lead
to Salvation. In fact it doesn't, as Saturn is eventually overthrown by one of his sons, and for
the dog there is no salvation, no hope, and there is no God. The dog is Goya's stand-in for Humanity.
Struggling alone, just like the dog, we are looking to the sky for a miracle that will never come.
As politics in Spain became even more oppressive, Goya left at the age of 78, to start over in France
And he died there - a patriot in Exile.
Goya has been called the most radical artist that ever lived, the last of the Old Masters
and the first of the moderns. But the word that comes up again and again with Goya is 'truth'.
He was a prescient artist who became the chronicler of a violent age, and gave us uncomfortable truths,
that are as relevant today, as they ever were. He showed us
that ordinary people are capable of evil, and can do extraordinary things.
And that sometimes, when we are looking for 'monsters', we should look within ourselves.