Word: goya
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Besides being one of Spain's greatest painters, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was an ardent aficionado of the bullfight. He sometimes signed his name "Francisco de los Toros," and he claimed to have faced the bulls himself in his youth. At 69, after a lifetime of watching the recurring drama of blood, grace and courage, Goya set out to do a pictorial history of the bullfight. The result was a magnificent series of etchings called La Tauromaquia...
...etchings traced the development of bullfighting from its beginnings among the ancient Spaniards who fought in the open country, through the heyday of such distinguished amateurs as the Cid and King Charles V, and up to Goya's own time. One of his best scenes from the early days of bullfighting shows a group of toreros harassing with spears and a primitive banderilla a defiant bull that has downed two of their number. Another dramatic moment is captured in Goya's picture of the death of Pepe Illo, a popular 18th century matador and friend of Goya...
...first commercial edition of the 33 etchings of the Tauromaquia (Goya himself printed only a few copies in 1815) did not come out until 1855. A second edition was printed in 1876. Limited to 400 copies, it sold like wildfire, but a repeat printing was impossible because the plates were lost. They were found again in 1915, and a third and a fourth edition were printed. Finally, the plates disappeared once more during the Spanish Civil War, and it was feared that they had been destroyed in the fighting. In the last few years, the price...
...around you is false." The show, organized by the Surete Generale to increase vigilance against artistic forgeries, contained fake stamps, coins, "neolithic'' pottery, manuscripts and old masters, many of them so well done that they had fooled even the experts. Among the best forgeries: a Goya Crockery Seller on old canvas, with small, fanlike cracks to simulate age, a clever Pissarro landscape with false documentation of past owners, along with dazzling phonies labeled Da Vinci, Rubens, Corot. There was even a fake fake-a forged Titian which later turned out to hide, under layers of paint, another Titian...
...sighed over Goya...