Goya Language

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Goyas LanguageEdward F. Stanton

n late 1792, when Goya was forty-six years old, something happened thatwould change him forever. His climb to professional success was inter-rupted by an illness that almost killed him. We do not know exactly whatafflicted him, but it has been variously attributed to inflammation of the

inner ear, Mnires syndrome (or auditory vertigo), botulism, polio, hepatitis, and

syphilis. Whatever it was, the malady left him deaf for life. As Robert Hughes says,Goyas deafness is one of the insoluble mysteries of arts medical history, rankingwith Vincent van Goghs madness and depression (127).

At any rate, this terrible illness did not deter the Spaniard; if anything, the iso-lation brought by deafness seems to have enhanced his powers immeasurably. Aspainter to the court of the Bourbon monarchs, Goya continued painting officialportraits of kings, queens, nobles, and statesmen in order to make a living. Butnow he spent more time drawing and experimenting with new media like etchingand aquatint. By the late 1790s he was executingLos Caprichos, a set of engravingsthat revealed a vision very different from his official worksometimes comic,more often satirical, tragic, or grotesque. These prints were followed byLos Desas-tres de la guerra, Goyas record of the Peninsular wars between 1808 and 1812; LaTauromaquia, an elaborate treatment of the bullfight; and Los Disparates, an enig-

matic series of etchings and aquatints that seems to defy interpretation.In a certain sense Goyas turn to graphic work began while he was recover-ing from his illness in the Andalusian house of his friend and benefactorSebastin Martnez in 179394. There he had the opportunity to study thisgentlemans enormous collection of prints by European artists, especially fromEngland. Goya realized the possibilities of the new medium. He had madesome engravings before going deaf, but most were small copies after Velzquezspaintings in the royal collections in Madrid, which are of slight interest today(Hughes 177).1

Most of the etchings that Goya studied in Martnezs collection were satiresand caricatures with wordy, instructive captions. This kind of work had alsobecome popular in Spain. Several years before the publication of Goyas Capri-chos, for example, a pamphlet appeared that was an inventory of Spanish cloth-

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ing. One picture in this publication shows a sereno or night watchman andreads, El trage de Sereno, en una estampa en quartilla de marca mayor, en laque se demuestra explicado todo lo que debe llebar un Sereno para Zelar el tr-

mino que le corresponda; tambin se be un Currutaco que le acompaa.2

Another pamphlet, published around the same time, may have been known toGoya. It contained caricatures of donkeys dressed like humans of various pro-fessions. Its author described the Asinus Medicus in aquintillaor five-sylla-ble stanza:

Es tu enfermedad fatal,Dice este Doctor, advierte,El principio de tu malEs, que eres un animalEn la vida, y en la muerte. . .3

In his Caprichos, Goya created a set of six prints that use donkeys to satirizehuman foibles; these etchings are sometimes referred to as his asneras. The titleof one of these engravings poses a simple question: De que mal morir?(see fig-

ure 1).4 The answer, of course, is that the patient will not die because of an ill-ness, but because his doctor is a quack. In contrast to the wordy doggerel of thepoem above, the caption is forceful and concise.

Goyas titles are very different from those that were popular at the time. Hedoes not attempt to be descriptive or moralistic. Rather than appropriatingand exhausting analysis through lengthy captions, he gives us rubrics that arebrief and open-ended. The wide range of interpretations among his contem-poraries demonstrates that they struggled with the meanings of his works asmuch as we do. One of the Caprichos, for example, with the simple title Duen-decitos(figure 2), was interpreted literally by the author of the so-called Pradomanuscript, who enumerated the characteristics of these little creatures: theyare jolly, playful, obliging, a little greedy and fond of practical jokes, but ingeneral good-natured. On the other hand, the author of the contemporaryLpez de Ayala manuscript read the engraving as satire and al legory, constru-ing the dwarfish figures as priests and monkslos verdaderos duendecitos deeste mundo; they were agents of the Church with its mano larga y dientecanino. . .5 Both interpretationsas well as othersmay be valid, but nei-ther captures all the elements in Goyas print: the individuality of the threegoblins, their varied body language, the unknown content of their cups andbowls, the odd window in the background, the play of light and shadows, thedelightful humor. In his new book on Los Caprichos, Andrew Schulz observesthat the semantic indeterminacy of these prints accounts for the continuousfascination of two centuries of viewers (19293). The same holds true formost of Goyas later graphic work from Los Desastres de la guerrathrough LosDisparates.

An examination of other prints will show how the artist used compression andambiguity in his titles. One Capricho shows a monk brandishing an enormoussyringe that will flush out the intestines of an unfortunate dissenter (figure 3). Its

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Figure 1. De que mal morira?,Los Caprichos, plate 40. Reproduced by per-mission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.



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Figure 2. Duendecitos,Los Caprichos, plate 49. Reproduced by permission

of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.



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Figure 3. Tragala perro,Los Caprichos, plate 58. Reproduced by permissionof Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.



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captionTragala perroderives from a popular eighteenth-century song ofSpanish liberals who insulted the absolutists of the Bourbon dynasty:

[. . .] Y mientras dure

esta canallano cesaremosde decir Trgala!. . .Trgala, trgala,

trgala, perro!6

Here the artist followed his usual method of reduction and inversion as he omit-ted the repetition of the refrain and put the antimonarchical command in thetorturers gaping mouths.

Another etching from Los Caprichosquotes two lines from a satire written byGaspar Melchor de Jovellanos; they refer to the nubile women who were marriedoff to men of means: El si pronuncian y la mano alargan / Al primero que llega(fig-ure 4).7Although the titles borrowed verses are impeccable and articulate a jus-tifiable criticism of marriage customs, they lack the power and concision of the

headings that Goya created out of whole cloth.The modern poet Rafael Alberti proved the lyrical potential of the artists cap-

tions by stringing six of them together in the verses of a poem titled Goya:Duendecitos. Soplones.Despacha, que despiertan . . .

Ya es hora.Gaudeamus!Buen viaje. (A la pintura34749)

Each of these poetic sentences refers to one of the artists prints from Los Caprichos.8

The lines can be parsed as perfectly as those of Jovellanos, but they are pithier andmore incisive. In his autobiography, Alberti referred to the masters minimal titlesand the impact they had on his own development as a painter (La arboleda120).

Another Spanish poet, Federico Garca Lorca, rendered homage to Goya in hislecture Teora y juego del duende (Prosa). His poetry may resonate with echoesof the artists work. In another one ofLos Caprichos, titled Que se la llevaron!, twomen kidnap a young woman in the night (figure 5). Goya uses the colloquialque both for emphasis (as in Spanish expressions like Que s, que s!) and toindicate that the action takes place in medias res: something has occurred earlierthat leads up to the abduction. In the most famous poem in the Spanish language,Lorcas Romance de la casada infiel, the poet employs the word in a similar way,prefixing it with the second conjunction y to make the language still moreemphatic and to throw the reader even more directly into the events: Y que mela llev al ro / creyendo que era mozuela. . . (Primer romancero gitano 134).

Brevity is the most obvious mark of Goyas language and what sets him apartfrom other printmakers of the period. If we compare the provisional titles for his

preparatory drawings with the captions for their corresponding prints, we will seethat the artist tended to slash his own words unsparingly. The rubric of his sketchfor Capricho 14, for example, which portrays a young woman surrounded by




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grotesque suitors, reads Sacrificio del Ynteres. . . son Seoritos a cual mas rico; yla pobre / no sabe a qual escoger. In the final print based on this drawing, Goyareduced the title to the terse Que sacrificio!(figure 6). The words seem charged withemotion, revealing compassion for the victim of this arranged marriage; at the sametime, they sound understated, suggesting a distance between image and text. The

sketch for Capricho 69, which represents a gang of witches and pedophiles, is calledSueo de Brujas/consumadas; in the final print, the artist condenses the working titleto a single word, Sopla(figure 7). This succinct caption focuses the viewers atten-

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Figure 4. El si pronuncian y la mano alargan / Alprimero que llega,Los Caprichos, plate 2. Reproducedby permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan Uni-versity.



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tion on the anus of the abused child in the center of the etching. It shows the samedisturbing ambiguity as Que sacrificio!How are we supposed to react to these worksthat depict such abominable vicesthe exploitation of a young woman and achildto which the artist responds with such laconic words?

On occasion, Goyas self-editing sacrifices shades of meaning to verbal econo-my. A case in point is the original epigraph of the sketch for his Capricho 13,Sueo / De unos hombres que se nos comian. The words refer to a group of monks

who are stuffing themselves with food. The longer title of the preliminary draw-ing ended up in the final print as Estan calientes, a heading that is tighter and


Figure 5. Que se la llevaron!, Los Caprichos, plate 8.Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wes-leyan University.



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more suggestive but that lacks the critical, social reach of the first: these men andother religious are eating the country out of house and home (figure 8).

In most instances the artist transformed the detached and objective descrip-

tions of his sketches into the more urgent and subjective comments of his engrav-ings. No less than eleven ofLos Caprichoshave exclamations as their titles, whichof course reveal the speakersGoyasemotion, often ironic: Que sacrificio!;Que pico de Oro!, he describes a parrot in another print; Brabisimo!, he applaudsa monkey who is playing a guitar. About half as many of the engravings in thisseries pose questions, usually sarcastic: De que mal morira?; Si sabr mas el discip-ulo?, Goya inquires of a donkey who is teaching another ass in a schoolroom;Porque esconderlos?, he asks a moribund clergyman who attempts to hide hismoney bags. The artist even places one of his captions in the first person, creat-ing a private voice that shocks us because it is so unexpected, so different fromthe public tone of titles by other artists at the time. In one of his Desastres de laguerra, Goya tells us Yo lo vi, proclaiming that he has been an eye witness to theflight of the etchings mother with her little child and the priest with the stolen

treasure from his parish (figure 9).In another print from the same series, a hooded figure walks by a row of

corpses in the dark, probably after looting them (figure 10). The caption may bethe most beautiful and haunting in all of Goyas work: Las camas de la muerte.Here the artists language achieves the metaphorical dimension of lyric poetry.

Schulz observes that Goyas titles contain no proper names, rarely exceed threeor four words in length, and often focus attention on the image by directing theviewer to make visual comparisons or examinations (191). In his captions,preaching and didacticism become miniature works of artbrief, almost private,fragmentary. One year after the publication ofLos Caprichos, Friedrich Schlegelwould argue in his bookDialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorismsthat a fragmentcould be considered aesthetically complete. More than a century later, Walter Ben-

jamin would say that it is the sign of a dawning modernity. Goya has appropri-ately been called the last Old Master and the first Modernist (Hughes 10).

Without the graphic work that he executed after his illness, the Spanish artistwould seem much less modern. In many ways, his engravings foreshadow polit-ical cartoons of the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Goya would goon to create whole series of prints that combine visual and verbal language: LosCaprichoswould contain eighty plates; Los Desastres de la guerra, eighty-three, LaTauromaquia, forty-seven;9 Los Disparates, twenty-two.

Of course the artists deafness alone cannot explain his turn from other mediato etching, with its use of words to support the images. We should not seek cause-and-effect relationships between Goyas life and his work, keeping in mind thatwriters, painters, and musicians are influenced by works of other artists as well asby their own experience, that forms and genres may develop independently of

historical and cultural forces. I am simply using Goyas deafness as a metaphor tohelp us understand the changes that occurred in his art. They are clear for any-one to seeand hear. It does not make much difference whether it was an illness,

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the death of many children, depression, or any of the other possible causes thathave been adduced by art historians to explain the shift in Goyas work. Whatmatters is that his art changed dramatically in the years following his convales-cence and that language became an inseparable part of his aesthetic.

On 6 February 1799, Goya published a notice in the Diario de Madridannouncing the sale of his Caprichos, which could be purchased by the public inthe perfume and liquor store below his apartment at number 1, Calle del Desen-gao.10 Unlike his official portraits, his etchings did not belong to the court or a

client, but to the artist himself; they were his own to dispose of as he wished. Thepaintings had to bear the title ordered by the court or the patron, and this is theway they have come down to us, as King Charles III, King Charles IV, King Fer-


Figure 6. Que sacrificio!, Los Caprichos, plate 8. Repro-duced by permission of Davison Art Center, WesleyanUniversity.



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dinand VII, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Sebastin Martnez, the Duke ofAlba, the Duchess of Alba, and so forth. In contrast, Goya could freely inventcaptions for his drawings, etchings, and aquatints, because they were his. Thiswas the artistic freedom of which he had dreamt for at least twenty years. In let-ters to his friend Martn Zapater, he said es muy odioso el ynventar para otrosand that someday he hoped to stop being an artist of commissioned works todevote himself wholly to cosas de mi gusto.11

In the aftermath of Goyas malady and deafness, language became an integral part

of his work. As long as he had enjoyed the gift of hearing, his voice had been silentin his works. Then, at the same time as he lost the capacity to hear other peopleswords, he began to speak or write captions for his engravings. As we have seen,

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Figure 7. Sopla,Los Caprichos, plate 69. Reproduced bypermission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.



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his words are precise, succinct, and pointed. In contrast to the public titles of hispaintings, the captions for his prints are intimate and ironic, messages that speedacross time and sting like darts. In fact they probably strike us more sharply thanthey did his contemporaries, to whom they must have seemed strange and remote.

Goyas titles enrich and deepen the engravings. His language resonates with oragainst the images. Words enhance vision. Wecan hear those words.

University of Kentucky

NOTES

1. One exception was the remarkable El agarrotado (ca. 1770).


Figure 8. Estan calientes, Los Caprichos, plate 13.Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wes-leyan University.



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Figure 9. Yo lo vi,Los Desastres de la guerra, plate 44. Reproduced by per-mission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.

Figure 10. Las camas de la muerte, Los Desastres de la guerra, plate 62.Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.



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2. The pamphlet (1791) is cited in Helman 41.3. The pamphlet is titledMemorias de la insigne Academia Asnal(1792); its author was

a certain Doctor de Ballesteros (Helman 72).4. I use Goyas spellings for the titles of all his works.

5. For the complete texts of the Lpez de Ayala, Prado, and Biblioteca Nacional man-uscripts ofLos Caprichos, see Helman 21329.

6. This song would be sung with many variants by Spanish liberals well into the twen-tieth century, notably during the Spanish Civil War (193639). See Daz Viana.

7. Jovellanoss poem is titled A Arnesto (1786), first published in El Censor.8. The six phrases correspond respectively to Caprichos49, 48, 78, 80, 79 and 64. In

the case of 79 (Nadie nos ha visto), Alberti is alluding to the commentary in the Ayalamanuscript rather than to the etchings title; the text for this print states, Los abates yfrailes echan gaudeamus a solas, y luego nos aparentan arregladas costumbres.

9. The Tauromaquia series that Goya published during his lifetime (1816) containsthirty-three prints. Twelve others survive that were not included in the original edition(Blas Benito 12).10. The full text of the announcement appears in Gassier and Wilson 384.11. Letters of 22 January 1777 and 2 July 1788 (Goya 53, 278). For more on the artists

notion ofinvencin, see Tomlinson.

WORKS CITED

Alberti, Rafael. La arboleda perdida, I. Primero y segundo libros (19021931). Madrid:Alianza, 2002.

.A la pintura. Obras completas. Vol. 2. Poesa 19391963. Madrid: Aguilar, 1988.Blas Benito, Javier. La Tauromaquia de Goya. Prologue. El libro de la Tauromaquia:

Francisco de Goya. By Jos Manuel Matilla and Jos Miguel Medrano. Madrid: MuseoNacional del Prado, 2001. 1113.

Daz Viana, Luis. Canciones populares de la guerra civil. Madrid: Taurus, 1985.Garca Lorca, Federico. La casada infiel. Primer romancero gitano. Llanto por Ignacio

Snchez Mejas. Romance de la corrida de toros de Ronda y otros textos taurinos. Ed.Miguel Garca-Posada. Madrid: Castalia, 1988. 13437.

. Teora y juego del duende. Prosa. Madrid: Alianza, 1972. 16989.

Gassier, Pierre, and Juliet Wilson. The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya. NewYork: Morrow, 1971.Goya, Francisco de. Cartas a Martn Zapater. Ed. Mercedes gueda and Javier de Salas.

Madrid: Istmo, 2003.Helman, Edith. Trasmundo de Goya. 1963. Madrid: Alianza, 1983.Hughes, Robert. Goya. New York: Knopf, 2003.Schlegel, Friedrich. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. University Park: Pennsyl-

vania State UP, 1968.Schulz, Andrew. GoyasCaprichos:Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body. New York: Cam-

bridge UP, 2005.Tomlinson, Janis A. Francisco Goya: The Tapestry Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of

Madrid. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989.




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