Word: goya
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...biggest Goya show ever seen in the U. S. Chicagoans laid aside their war-headlined newspapers and went to look at pictures, in the ponderous, heavy-walled Chicago Art Institute. The exhibition last week was a record of war and revolution. Its pictures showed hangings, ax-murders, mutilations, bloody massacres of innocent civilians, trains of plodding, bewildered refugees, the indecisive faces of weak, shambling statesmen, vacillating, incompetent rulers. They showed chaos, panic, famine. The savage, flaming scenes, more than a century old, had a familiar, contemporary look, for the world as it looked to Spain's great painter...
...Aragonese peasant whose wife claimed kinship to a tattered strain of impoverished Spanish nobility, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born in the bedraggled, hard-bitten village of Fuendetodos, near Saragossa, in 1746. He grew into barrel-chested manhood, fighting ruffians and bulls with equal recklessness and gusto. Brawling and wenching his way to Rome, he studied there the shimmering rococo canvases of Tiepolo and Francesco de Guardi, returned to Madrid to work his way up as court painter to Spain's dissolute Charles...
...Goya's Spain was as rotten and bankrupt a monarchy as Europe had ever seen. Leprous beggars and pockmarked peasants scratched their lice and wallowed in filth unmatched since the Middle Ages. Degraded courtiers wasted themselves lewdly in fashionable excesses copied from the French court of Louis XVI. The harlot Queen Maria Luisa, a green-complexioned, toothless masterpiece of stale flesh, wore herself out with dissipation, while her doltish husband hunted serving wenches and rabbits. (Of Maria Luisa Napoleon said: "Her character is written on her face; it surpasses anything you dare imagine.") Spain's strong...
Resourceful, ruthless and self-assured, Goya rode the crest of this cloacal flood. A ram-headed man of enormous appetites, he ate himself to the verge of apoplexy, begot 20 legitimate children (only one survived the plague-ridden rigors of Spanish life), became the lover of the beautiful and powerful Duchess of Alba, a favorite of the harlot Queen, the most sought-after society portraitist of his time...
...though Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes gorged himself on Spain's decay, the diet made him sick. Savagely he etched and painted its hidden social sores and the festering minds of its leaders. When generals and duchesses commissioned him to do their portraits, he painted them, not as they would like to look, but as they really were: droopy, anemic cuckolds, smug gangsters, smirking strumpets. He etched bloated priests abusing women and embracing money bags, barely escaped the ire of the Inquisition by labeling them with trite moral maxims. On the walls of churches he gave angels...