Word: colossuses
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...Colossus has always figured as a masterwork among Francisco Goya's chronicle of human suffering during Spain's war of independence (1808-1812). But now Madrid's Prado museum, which long gave it pride of place, has come closer than ever to acknowledging that Goya didn't paint it. At a June 26 press conference, curators announced the museum would continue its inquiry into the work's authenticity after its investigative team identified the initials A. J. in the painting's lower left corner with the Valencian painter Asensio Juliá, a friend and collaborator of Goya. Though reserving final...
...dealing with Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, seen by many as a founding figure of modern art, and by most Spaniards as an icon of nationalism and revolutionary politics. Mena speaks from personal experience. When she was asked to write the catalog description for The Colossus for a Prado's exhibition in 1989, she already had doubts, but she knew that the painting was an untouchable part of Goya's oeuvre. "Less was known about Goya then," says Mena, "and what was known was not to be questioned...
...Goya: Fact and Fantasy exhibition, Mena's doubts grew when the painting was cleaned. "When we looked at it closely, free of its lofty presentation in a museum," she says, "it was obvious - this painting could not have been done by Goya." Mena and her colleagues removed The Colossus from the 1993 exhibition, but they didn't dare raise the matter in public. "It was too soon," says Mena. "The Colossus was a mythic painting in the academic world, written about by established scholars. To challenge that you have to check out everything very carefully...
...British expert Juliet Bareau-Wilson, who had also helped with the painting's restoration, reaped the whirlwind when she told an interviewer that "The Colossus was not Goya's work. "We were attacked by the press," says Mena, "by academics defending traditional interpretations, by nationalists for whom Goya was Spain's somber bullfighter, by political liberals for whom Goya was a revolutionary who stood against Napoleon. I understood something of what religious persecution is like...
...Though the "A" and the "J" visible on "The Colossus canvas appear to be finally persuading more experts that Juliá is the painting's true author, some still allow for the possibility of Goya's authorship. "Over recent years there has been a veritable cult of a sort of 'Goya code' of looking at scratch marks, odd jottings, odd shapes in old paint and anything that might be hidden just below the surface and making a lot out of it," says University of Essex Goya scholar Sarah Symmons. "Who might have painted a bit of the picture...