Goya by Robert Hughes

Author:Robert Hughes [Hughes, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-80962-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

Goya, Asensio Juliá, 1798. Oil on canvas, 56 × 42 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. (illustration credit 6.27)

Goya, Milagro de San Antonio de Padua (The Miracle of St. Anthony of Padua), 1798. Fresco. Dome, Iglesia de San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid. (illustration credit 6.28)

Whether Goya had help or not, none of the strain of working high in the dome shows in the completed work—only a radiant and diaphanous joie de vivre. The frescoes of San Antonio, with their butterfly-winged and deliciously sexy angels, are young man’s art, created, in defiance of oncoming age, by a man past fifty.

The main scene of the narrative occupies the dome. It illustrates a legendary episode in the life of St. Anthony that appeared in Christian Year, a devotional narrative of the more fabulous moments in the lives of the saints that was compiled by a French priest and rendered into Spanish by Fr. José Isla. While in Padua, St. Anthony received news that his father, a Portuguese named Don Martín Bulloes, had been accused of murdering a man in Lisbon. With the permission of his religious superiors, Anthony flew (miraculously; he was “transported” in a flash) to Lisbon and asked the judges in the murder trial to produce the victim’s corpse. The saint then solemnly asked the dead man to state, before judges, witnesses, and his accused father, whether his father had killed the man. The corpse rose and spoke: no, he had not. It then sank back onto its coffin, amid general consternation and awe. Don Martín Bulloes was, naturally, acquitted.

The raising of the dead man is, of course, the core of the story on Goya’s cupola. But he did it in a way that, though it had origins in Italian art, had no precedents in Spain. It is still an open question whether Goya, on his visit to Italy, would have seen any of the cupola frescoes where painted spectators crowd a circular balustrade above the viewer’s head. And if he did, as is probable, we do not know which ones. No matter: Goya’s version of this device is entirely his own, both in narrative intensity and in down-homeness. To begin with, he took the usual Baroque layout—heaven and angels above, Earth and people below—and stood it on its head. Here, the cupola is the zone of Earth and people, and the angels in the pendentives and the intrados of the arches are holding it all up. He has not used a formal marble balustrade; what prevents the figures, some fifty of them, from toppling into our space below is a simple ring railing of wood, the posts perhaps of iron. Behind them are blue mountains, a tree or two, and the sky—we are outdoors, in a generic landscape, not a Portuguese courtroom. Goya has gone head-on against the Baroque esthetic, with its foam and flutter of angels, saints, putti, and other heavenly fauna in a celestial, indeterminate space. It seems that before getting to work on San Antonio de la Florida,

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