黑料不打烊

As supreme mirages of dark delight and horror, Goya’s late paintings and etchings were probably inspired by the imagery of gothic novels, which he must have read either in English or French, for the Inquisition blocked such morally ambiguous books until the 1820s and 30s when the mood for reform spilling across European borders after the French Revolution and Napoleon’s attack on Spain freed romanticism from the restraints of the Church.

Although Spain was shielded from the pernicious influence of horror novels by the censors of the Inquisition, French and British novels filled with sentiment, vengeance, and the supernatural mood were available on the black market. The Castle of Otranto had been published in French in 1767, The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794, and the Englishman William Beckford’s Vathek was written in French in 1786. Sometimes the gothic style was used by Spanish activists to frame messages leveled against the oppression of the church. Banished to France in 1801, Luis Gutiérrez wrote Cornelia Bororquia, o La víctima de la Inquisición (Cornelia Bororquia, or Victim of the Inquisition) as an inflammatory piece of propaganda leveled against the inquisition in the manner of a gothic novel. In it, a lustful bishop threatened the virtue of an innocent woman, who stabbed her tormentor to death while defending herself from his advances and was quickly condemned to execution by repulsive and dishonest inquisitors. The creation of Goya’s darkest Black Paintings coincided with the arrival of gothic horror in the Spanish language – translations of Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Radcliffe’s The Italian, and W. H. Ireland’s The Abbess all arrived between 1818 and 1832, and censorship was relaxed during the Liberal Triennium of 1820 – 1823. Polidori’s The Vampyre was published in English with great success under Lord Byron’s name in 1819 and quickly adapted in French a year later by the popular author Charles Nodier as a play, Le Vampire.

Francisco Goya, El Aquelarre (Witches' Sabbath), Oil on Canvas, 1797-1798

During this period of gothic and subversive intrusion into Spain, in 1797 Goya painted his Witches' Flight, The Spell, The Witches' Kitchen, The Devil's Lamp, both of his Witches' Sabbaths, and The Stone Guest, for the beautiful and powerful Duchess of Osuna, María Josefa Pimentel. The paintings all sat firmly within the context of the international success of gothic horror – although it is unknown whether she purchased them already complete from Goya, or commissioned them, they became boudoir paintings in her country house in Alameda. The long-faced and Francophile duchess was known as a beacon of the enlightenment and held salons at her palace sharing the arts. Goya had painted her wearing French fashion for his affectionate portrait of her in 1785, and in a family group completed in 1788, and she purchased one of the first editions of the Caprichos etchings which had already shown Goya’s propensity for supernatural imagery.

Francisco Goya, María Josefa Pimentel, Duchess of Osuna, Oil on Canvas, 1785

A serious illness left Goya deaf and withdrawn in winter of 1792-93, and the illness had a noticeable impact on his work. Before this episode, Goya’s paintings had been the conventional and uninspired work of a courtier artist – he had been appointed Painter to the King in 1786, producing portraits of aristocrats and the rulers of the realm and designs for decorative tapestries. After his illness, the gothic aesthetic emerged in full flower as he pulled imagery from the most obscure corners of his imagination. His Los Caprichos etchings were published in 1799, the same year he was honored with the highest rank of Prime Court Painter. The most famous of the images is probably The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, where an unconscious man is haunted by a swarm of bats swooping and swirling about him as he sleeps, unaware of their fearful attention.

Francisco Goya, Mucho hay que chupar (There is Plenty to Suck), Plate 45 from Los Caprichos, Etching and aquatint, 1799

After Napoleon’s armies marched into the Peninsular War of 1807 and the forces of Portugal and England joined their ancient Spanish antagonists to fight the French intrusion, Goya began work on his Disasters of War prints. The horrors of Disasters of War were supremely grotesque, surpassing the depraved and degenerate cruelty of the Marquis de Sade, whose repulsive Justine had been published in 1791 and again with his evil Juliette in 1797-99, and become a notorious sensation among libertines. Now, arriving with the suppression of the Dos de Mayo revolt against the French occupation in 1808, atrocities on a scale far worse than De Sade’s bedroom perversions spread their black wings over Spain. Goya seems to have witnessed some of the scenes he drew among his immense portfolio reporting the soul-crushing barbarities of the French incursion – plate 44 was titled I Saw This – and driven by sublime horror, his graphic and gothic imagination perfectly fulfilled its imagery. The vengeful Bourbon monarchy was restored to the Spanish throne in 1814, but Goya feared the fortunes of war, and knew his incendiary pictures would feed the public imagination, adding their percussive beat to the drum of conflict in the back-and-forth rhythm of revolutions and restorations, and withdrew them from sale – the Disasters were published after his death in 1828.

Franciso Goya, Contra el Bien General (Against the Common Good), plate No. 71 of Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), Etching and aquatint.

Goya’s iconography links his art to opium, a standard treatment in the Spanish pharmacopeia, which was likely to have been used to treat him during his illness. Before his illness, Goya had been an allegorical painter, and understood the use of metaphor to build a narrative of meaning. In his intense Disasters of War series of etchings, he revisited the bats of The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, using their wings to bedevil the leaders of the French revolution. The wings were prominent in his superb Contra el Bien General (Against the General Good), which held a prominent place in Goya’s the portfolio, with an apathetic accountant seated on a mound, keeping an indifferent record of the dead, his feet resting on a globe, and one rhetorical finger raised steady with pregnant pause and maintaining abstracted unconcern for the misery of a gathering of wailing mourners. Here he used bat wings growing from the vampire’s temples to symbolize a detached carelessness, absent thoughtlessness, and cruel dullness, the winged temples which were the symbol of the Greek God of sleep, Hypnos, or the Roman Somnus. In the royal collection Goya likely saw an exquisitely carved armless Hypnos with wings growing from his temples as the sign of his identity, and this feature migrated into Goya’s aesthetic. Now, the claws and skin of bat’s wings sprouted from his vampire’s temples where Hypnos’ wings had spread their feathers to the poppied wind, and his eyes were the burdened bags of an aging and opiated addict.

Head of Hypnos, Greek God of Sleep, bronze, 3rd century BC. Photo: Paul Hudson

The vampire etching was one of Goya’s illustrations of the Italian Giambattista Casti’s poem Gli Animali Parlanti (The Talking Animals), a political satire of bestial republican revolutionaries cast as dogs, elephants, and tigers locked in struggle against the lion, King Louis XVI. The poem was a counter-revolutionary allegory in which monstrous animals oppressed mankind. Fighting with drawings, copperplates, and ink for the Royalist cause against the Republic, Goya illustrated the vampire accountant as a propagandist caricature of the leaders of the blood and slaughter in France, sucking money from naïve Americans who aided the revolution. Two verses read:

Di costoro alla testa era il Vampiro,

Pria finanzier, procurator poi regio,

Esperto in tesser cabala o raggiro,

Intrigator e succiator egregio,

Oltramarin quadrupede volante,

a grosso Nottolon rassomigliante.

Egli è animai malefico deforme,

Che lieve il sangue attrae lambendo e sugge

al malaccorto American che dorme

e che noi sente, e lo dissangua e strugge:

Onde, chi'l portentoso in tutto vede

Di sangue succiator spettro lo crede.

At their head stood the Vampire,

Once financier, then royal advocate,

Adept at weaving plots,

A master schemer and sucker

An ultramarine, four-footed beast of flight,

Resembling a large bat.

He is a beast, in malign and twisted form,

Who softly licks and draws the blood away

From heedless Americans, asleep, unwary,

Unfeeling as he drains him dry and destroys him:

Thus, those who see portents in everything

Deem him a blood sucking specter.

In the next etching in the series, Las Resultas (The Results) the vampire sickness had spread to a flock of bats flapping in the night and the grim vampire was squatting on the chest of a victim, tearing at his bloodied shirt.

These vampires, these undead night walkers who fed on the living, trapping their victims in a melancholy cycle of addiction, and draining their vitality, these monsters of imagination, who brought with them a mythology of supernatural creativity cloaked in the haze of stupor – these were haunting figures born of opium dreams. Goya was haunted by them after his illness left him deaf and melancholy, and they became powerful metaphors for the blood-hungry forces of the collectivist revolutionaries.

Francisco Goya, El Sueño de la Razon Produce Monstruos, (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters), Plate 43 from Los Caprichos, Etching and aquatint, 1799

Among the Caprichos, his famous The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is customarily read as an objection to the irrational consequences born of the enlightenment, but an artist is not a symbol of any kind of enlightenment – and a caption beneath the picture read, “La fantasía abandonada de la razón, produce monstrous imposibles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus maravillas (Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders).” The sleeper is more likely to have been in the grip of opium and wandering in the visionary landscapes of the sublime. Opium put reason to sleep. It was the source of vivid and frightening hallucinations and it let monsters creep upon perception.

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