Word: goya
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Goya's Spain was as rotten and bankrupt a monarchy as Europe had ever seen. Leprous beggars and pockmarked peasants scratched their lice and wallowed in filth unmatched since the Middle Ages. Degraded courtiers wasted themselves lewdly in fashionable excesses copied from the French court of Louis XVI. The harlot Queen Maria Luisa, a green-complexioned, toothless masterpiece of stale flesh, wore herself out with dissipation, while her doltish husband hunted serving wenches and rabbits. (Of Maria Luisa Napoleon said: "Her character is written on her face; it surpasses anything you dare imagine.") Spain's strong...
Resourceful, ruthless and self-assured, Goya rode the crest of this cloacal flood. A ram-headed man of enormous appetites, he ate himself to the verge of apoplexy, begot 20 legitimate children (only one survived the plague-ridden rigors of Spanish life), became the lover of the beautiful and powerful Duchess of Alba, a favorite of the harlot Queen, the most sought-after society portraitist of his time...
...though Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes gorged himself on Spain's decay, the diet made him sick. Savagely he etched and painted its hidden social sores and the festering minds of its leaders. When generals and duchesses commissioned him to do their portraits, he painted them, not as they would like to look, but as they really were: droopy, anemic cuckolds, smug gangsters, smirking strumpets. He etched bloated priests abusing women and embracing money bags, barely escaped the ire of the Inquisition by labeling them with trite moral maxims. On the walls of churches he gave angels...
...censor-ridden Spain of the early 1800s, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes could say in paint what few dared say in words. But, for all his bitter satire and savage realism, Goya was no reforming idealist. When Napoleon kicked out Goya's Bourbon patrons and set his own brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne, Goya quickly came to terms with the new regime, and took to painting Bonapartist officials, as he had previously painted Bourbon courtiers. When, a few years later, the Bourbons were restored. Goya changed his coat again. Roared Bourbon Ferdinand VII: "You deserve...
...Ferdinand VII and his inquisitors were slow at forgetting, and life in Spain for the aging, ailing Goya became increasingly irksome. Stone deaf and myopic at 78, he got permission to leave the country, traveled to Paris "to see the world," finally settled among a group of Spanish refugees in Bordeaux. There, in 1828, still painting and drawing with all his old vigor and many a new-found trick, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes died. A scene he would have enjoyed came on a subsequent fantastic midnight when ghoulish phrenologists stole his skull from the Bordeaux graveyard...