Word: goya
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...ancient Egypt, the god Osiris was chopped to pieces on the orders of his mother. Terror haunts Beowulf and the Book of Job. But horror as civilized commercial entertainment arose in the rationalist 18th century, and its compensatory function was recognized. In one of his Caprichos, Painter Francisco Goya said it all: "The sleep of reason breeds monsters...
...sporting life, which offered Franco virtually his only escape from official routine, was abandoned in recent years for the regal pleasures of a cloistered castle existence: liveried servants, Moorish guards on white stallions, walls covered with Goya tapestries-and obsequiousness everywhere. Foreign ambassadors who were granted audiences with the Caudillo had a precise protocol of steps and bows. In addition to his love of pomp, Franco was a man of rigid decorum, methodical habit and deep Christian piety; his orderly days included regular attendance at Mass and midnight recitation of the rosary with his wife, the former Carmen Polo...
Last year, when I would write these listings, I kept pushing people to go see the exhibit of Goya's prints which was presented last year at the Museum of Fine Arts. Well, I'm going to sound like last year all over again here, because the Boston campus of UMass is exhibiting, in their Harbor Gallery, a selection of prints from Goya's series The Disasters of War. In this series, Goya depicts some of the most brutal and horrific war scenes imaginable, and succeeds in producing an extremely eloquent anti-war statement, one of the strongest...
...wryly makes clear, that can be neatly schematized. The same movement, after all, encompasses Ingres, "imprisoned within his obsession with the outline," and Turner, experimenting with pure, nearly formless color. Indeed, Clark finds romanticism's unconscious beginnings in the work of the last great classicist, David, and in Goya, deaf, hating and isolated beyond the Pyrenees. As before, Clark is wonderfully deft at demonstrating the cross-pollination of ideas and more than ever willing to express his own impatience with the second-rate. Even his beloved Turner is charged with doing some "corny" paintings...
...wonder if Goya's faith in reason endured the Spanish-French war, which ended in 1813. For the question of his time was a gnawing fear that greed and lust might indeed win out over the pull of rational thought. For as Goya's contemporary, Alexander Pope, once asked...