Word: goya
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Striving for the same objectivity, the same near-magical illusionism that distinguished Velásquez, Goya took up portraiture himself...
...Francisco Goya died of the infection that deafened him at 47, he would be remembered only as a Spanish court painter with a knack for candid likenesses. But the tortuous, stone-silent path he entered in middle age led steeply upward, and he clambered gloomily to greatness. The blackest and harshest of the old masters, Goya made bitterness a virtue and found pessimism a fountain of youth. A big traveling show of Goya drawings, on display this week in San Francisco, proves once again how great his final achievement...
Troublesome Tourist. Goya's beginnings were humble; they did not make him so. Every self-respecting Spaniard considers himself in some sense noble, and Goya was born in one of the proudest Spanish regions: barren Aragon. His father, a gilder by trade, was too poor to provide much for his son's education, so Goya decamped for Madrid, twice tried and failed to get an art scholarship. In 1766, when he was 20, Goya turned up in Italy. According to legend, he was a troublesome tourist, cocky, stocky, amorous and quick to duel...
Five years later, Goya returned to Spain. He married the sister of an influential painter named Bayeu, got a commission to design tapestries for the royal weavers. Everyday-life scenes were the assigned subjects which forced Goya to look sharply at the world around him. His tapestries could not be called brilliant, but they record the life of the day with considerable verve. Ordered to make engravings after the Velásquez portraits that hung in the palace galleries, he did a barely creditable job, but the genius of his predecessor was impressed upon...
Last week, Producers Sam Spiegel (On the Waterfront) and Joseph Mankiewicz (The Barefoot Contessa) were jockeying with each other and with Italian Director Alberto Lattuada (Mill on the Po) to get a head start in shooting the life of Goya in its original Spanish setting. All three want Marlon Brando in the title role. But so does Director Stanley Kramer, whose new film, The Pride and the Passion, will be entirely photographed in Spain...