Word: goya
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...what they do not possess -- especially not the Caprichos and the Disasters of War -- is the sense of intellectual decorum and poise that the well-born, French-reading illuminati of Madrid preferred the discourse of images to have. Goya was not good at optimistic allegory. His large painting of the adoption of the liberal constitution of 1812 -- the constitution as a maiden in white presented by Father Time while pretty Clio, the muse of history, takes notes -- is one of his few real pictorial failures...
Moral reflection, in Goya's prints and not a few of his paintings, moves from being a philosophical exercise into a sort of frenzy, a despairing assault on a world of terminal evil. Greed, whoring, pederasty, witchcraft and the religious bigotry that was its mirror image, the brutality of the low and the myopic arrogance of the high, and above all the limitless cruelties inflicted in the name of orthodoxy (by the Inquisition) and political conquest (by the invading French and their guerrilla opponents): these possess him as they have possessed no other artist before or since. Seen through...
Some of the best of the portraits in which Goya celebrated the nation's distinguished liberals are also in the show. There is his impressive if slightly servile early image of Floridablanca, Prime Minister to the liberal Carlos III and, by 1808, head of the Junta Central that organized opposition to the invading French armies. There is his group portrait of the Osuna family, who held freethinking tertulias (discussion groups) in their ducal palace to which Goya came, along with the best writers and wits in Madrid. From the Countess of Chinchon, pregnant, dithering and infinitely vulnerable in her misty...
...equivalent, in its effort to embody intellect, of David's portrait of the Lavoisiers -- is his 1798 portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the outstanding thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, a much-exiled man who briefly held state office as the Minister of Religion and Justice under Carlos IV. Goya shows him at an ornate desk in the Madrid palace, lost in melancholy thought amid props that seem out of scale with his modesty...
...cannot be an accident that Goya adapted Jovellanos' pose for the dreaming figure in The Sleep of Reason. He had no illusions about the distance between liberal hope and the possibility of its fulfillment. But even though present-day Republicans and their flacks have corrupted the American air with babblings about the L word, as though liberalism were something to be ashamed of, Goya's beliefs, so passionately held, still testify to the liberal conscience as the best hope of Western man in the past 200 years...