This Is the Great Goya

Here he is in his studio in Madrid in about 1795:

goya  self-portrait

He’s doing your portrait.
You have just walked into his studio and are standing where he showed you, in front of that enormous window—one of the biggest you ever saw in 1795.

He stands right in the light, so until your eyes adjust, he’s just a silhouette. Little by little, while he takes little nervous steps back and forth in front of the canvas and makes little sweeps with his painting brush, you start to make him out.

He is short and probably a little chubby, though it’s hard to tell because for this portrait he put on that bolero jacket and pulled those striped leggings over his breeches.   Painters often put on their most extravagant outfits for a portrait for color and interest.  But this jacket looks very much like a belly screen.

And that weird hat?  What’s that all about?

goya self cut 2

He sees you looking and stops to explain. He explains by acting and gestures. Ever since he went deaf the cat got his tongue. He picks up a candle and  sticks it onto one of the prongs around the rim, to show you.  “I paint at night,” he finally says, and goes back to his canvas as soon as he sees you understand.
His son Javier wrote: “My dad used to put on the final touches of a painting, for greater effect, at night, with artificial light.”

But now it isn’t night.
Well, it happens to cover up the bald top of his head. The long hair dropping out underneath would throw anyone off, too.

The palette with his favorite colors is the real thing.  Earth colors, just ten. With those he could do anything he wanted to.

Now he’s doing a  full-length portrait of you—look at the size of his canvas. The beautiful Duchess of Alba stood right where you are standing and watched this same Goya (hatless?)  paint her.

goya duchess alba2

He literally painted her, by the way.  In her capricious way, she walked over to Goya’s studio one morning before a party and asked him to paint her face. Goya was so excited afterwards that he wrote his friend:  “I bet you’d like to come and help me paint [the Duchess of] Alba, who came in here yesterday asking me to paint her face—and she got what she wanted. By the way, I like that much better than painting on canvas, which I will do too, as I have to do a full-length portrait of her as soon as I finish one of the Duke of Alcudia on horseback [Godoy, the most important man in the realm at the time].”  Goya is bragging a little to his friend. The country kid has made the bigtime.

Writing wasn’t his metier.  He was awkward at it and ended even this choppy letter with a drawing—a caricature of himself.  “I’m like this,” he says. He was always making fun of his own flat nose and here he makes his face into a crescent moon.

goya caricature

He may not have spoken much anymore, and he hated to write.  But he was all the same the greatest communicator of them all.  Few men in any time have been able to bring out of themselves and show so much of a deep and complex world.

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Madrid’s Mona Lisa

SCP38678

Lucrezia by Andrea del Sarto

She hangs on a wall of the Prado Museum in Madrid, ever bewitching.

Who painted her?

Her husband, Andrea del Sarto, who was crazy about her, to his great bad luck.
He was one of the greatest painters of the Renaissance. Many thought he painted so well he might have rivalled the great Leonardo da Vinci. Everyone loved and respected him.

Then along came Lucrezia and Andrea lost his head.  According to Giorgio Vasari, who knew her, she was no good.    She mistreated Andrea’s friends and even his apprentices, and she brought out a shocking weakness in him.

What did she do that was so bad?  Maybe Vasari just didn’t like her.

For instance:
Andrea’s reputation as a painter was so great that the very King of France invited him to come and work for him. He gave Andrea a place to live and a splendid salary and treated Andrea as a personal friend.
One evil day Andrea got a letter from Lucrezia back in Florence. She said she missed him and was miserable. If he didn’t come right home she would—well, she would die.

Andrea ran to ask the king for permission to return to Florence. “It will only be for a short time,” he said. The king put on a very sour face. He had already had some bad experience with Italian artists.

Andrea had an idea: “Your Majesty loves great paintings, right?  Well, while I’m home in Florence I can buy some good ones for you.”

That worked. The king’s face brightened. He knew he could trust the tastes of one of the world’s greatest artists to spot good paintings, and he gave him plenty of money to buy them. “Hurry back, my friend,” he told him.

Guess what happened.  Andrea hurried home to Florence and was reunited with his beloved Lucrezia.  They celebrated their reunion with magnificent feasts. Lucrezia told Andrea that while he was away she had been dreaming of a beautiful Tuscan villa where they could live with dignity; and she  showed him her plans. He happened to have some cash (the king’s) and so he told Lucrezia her wish was his command. They began to build the beautiful Tuscan villa.

One day they ran out of funds.  Andrea woke up remembering King Francis and his promise to return soon.  “Lucrezia,” he told her after she had woken too. “I must go back to the king.”
“You’re not serious,” she said. “The king has already forgotten about you. And that money to him is nothing. Stay here with your little Lucrezia.”  And she gave him a kiss of the kind that simply paralyzed him.
He never went back and King Francis cursed him and all Italians too.

Lucrezia did one more nasty thing. When the plague was raging through Florence Andrea fell sick. Lucrezia quickly left not only the house but Florence too.  She had great fear of contagion. Andrea  died alone in the house and was found days later and buried just anywhere. Lucrezia, probably because of her foresight, survived that plague and forty more years of flu-s and other common maladies.

See Robert Browning’s famous poem, one of his dramatic monologues, in which Andrea talks to Lucrezia on a beautiful Tuscan evening.

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Murillo’s Homey Virgin

Murillo is one of the great colorists of the world.
Look at this beautiful Virgin and Child, now in the Prado Museum of Madrid.
murillo virgin2

Virgen del Rosario con el Niño (164 x 110 cm.) Painted 1650-1655

It shows the best of Murillo. He was a simple man with his heart open all the time and his sweetness was no cynic’s trick. It often ran away with him. But not here, or not far.

Sure, Murillo was thinking of Caravaggio and his dark paintings. But the cold Caravaggio could never have thought of such charming details as this playful Child walking on his young mother’s lap. He would never have thought of pushing together their cheeks like that nor of that look of simple welcome and curiosity those two give the viewer. Caravaggio would have given his stage-lighted figures a dramatic importance but never such dignity.
And no one but Murillo could have invented those gorgeous colors.

See Murillo’s Smiling Boy too.

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