Word: goya
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Four years later, while helping curate the Prado's 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...
...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...
...most in the academic art world seem resigned to The Colossus being an inferior work by a Goya imitator. Not just the initials buttress that judgment, but also the coarse depiction of the giant's musculature, the less-than-careful rendition of the surrounding landscape, and the unnatural way in which a soldier is falling from his galloping horse. Symmons still isn't convinced. "Goya did create a number of highly unorthodox works in maturity," she says, "and these works do not always correspond to the way some scholars like to regard him - as a more decorous and orthodox artist...
...there is a lesson in the long controversy over The Colossus, says Mena, it's this: "There comes a point when you realize that adoration of art or artists is not good for the pursuit of knowledge. Those two initials on The Colossus have helped us understand better who Goya is and what his work means. That's what's important. You have to keep moving forward with new eyes, without prejudice. Then...