Word: goya
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...stroked over the rough surface, produced a slightly blurred line and deep granular tones -- the equivalent of his intricately speckled surfaces in painting. And he was a great draftsman -- one of the greatest since the Renaissance, worthy, at the top of his form, of being compared to Rembrandt or Goya...
...idea that "low" sources somehow debase the integrity of "high" art is moonshine, of course. It always has been: Goya's Caprichos, for instance, draw heavily on folk proverbs, crude popular drama and 18th century (mainly English) caricature. Miro was inspired by comic strips and folk scatology. And Philip Guston in the 1970s was able to attain his measure of greatness as a tragic painter only through a free, uncondescending use of motifs from George Herriman's great strip Krazy Kat and the underground comics of Robert Crumb. Nor can MOMA be accused of pandering to mass taste by exhibiting...
...itself. It would include the Louvre's Entombment, the Bacchus and Ariadne from London, the Rape of Europa from Boston, the Borghese Gallery's Sacred and Profane Love, the Naples portrait of Pope Paul III and his two grandsons (surely the most piercing political image in Western art, until Goya's portrait of the family of Charles IV). And then there are the masterpieces that remain in Venice, such as the Pesaro Madonna in the Frari...
Despite its seeming modesty of size and intention, Rowlandson's work found echoes in Europe. Particularly so in the efforts of Goya, who sometimes drew on English satirical prints as sources for his own graphic work. One can detect more than a few appropriations of Rowlandson in the Caprichos. And one of Goya's scariest images, They Preen Themselves -- one demon giving another a pedicure -- seems to come from Rowlandson's group of a woman cutting an officer's toenail in The French Barracks, 1786, though how Goya actually got to see this particular Rowlandson is a mystery...
Velazquez's life was even, and little is known about its details. It looks quite seamless compared with the struggles of Spain's other archetypal painter, Goya -- a steadily mounting curve of recognition and respect, unmarred by scandal or alienation (although he did father one bastard in Rome). Born in Seville in 1599, the son of a minor Hidalgo family, half- Portuguese, possibly with a trace of Jewish ancestry, Velazquez would always be preoccupied with his social position. (He went to great lengths to qualify as a knight of the Order of Santiago, whose members would not accept him until...