Francisco Goya Romanticism

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, or more commonly known as Goya, was a Spanish Romantic artist during the late 18th and early 19th century. Goya was one of the first artists to appear in the Romantic period and is now referred to as the most influential artist of the time. For a majority of his career, Goya suffered through hearing loss, causing him to express his internal thoughts through paintings he did inside of his home. The paintings depicted many characteristics of the Romantic style with his use of intense emotions and ideas such as death and horror. These romantic aspects were especially distinguished in his most famous pieces The Third of May 1808, Saturn Devouring His Son, and Witches’ Sabbath.

Romanticism was an artistic and literary movement that began in the late 18th century Europe that stressed the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, glorification of the past and nature, and departure from forms of classicism. The movement emerged as a reaction against the ideas

of the Age of Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. For instance, romantics rejected the idea that reason can explain everything. Instead, they believed in intuition and looked for deeper, imaginative appeals. In art, some elements of the style included strong emotions of horror, fear, tragedy, heroic individualism, and nature as true beauty.
Goya was born on March 30, 1746 in Aragon, Spain and died on April 16, 1828. In 1786, Goya began working for the Spanish Crown as a court painter. His paintings during this time were quite traditional as they were only portraits of the Spanish aristocracy and royalty. Goya also worked with the rococo style when he created 42 designs used to decorate the interior walls of El Escorial and the Palacio Real del Pardo. Romantic styles did not thoroughly affect him until he was left completely deaf from an undiagnosed illness in 1793. The condition was first a hardship that impacted his art, but resourceful, Goya used the limitations to his advantage. “His illness had allowed him the insight to produce works that were more personal and informal...it did not allow him to capture complex colour shift or texture, and was unsuited to the impasto and glazing techniques he was by then applying to his painted works” (“Francisco Goya”). The condition caused him to suffer through tinnitus, or ringing or buzzing in the ears, frequent occurrences of imbalance, and possibly paranoid dementia. The paranoid delusions might have influenced Goya to transform the fearful monsters in his head into the horrifying creatures apparent in some of his pieces, such as St. Francis Borgia Helping a Dying Impenitent. Nonetheless, after the discovery of his unknown condition in 1793, his art progressively transitioned into more frightful and darker styles.
In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain anticipating to restore order in the country. Bonaparte removed the royal family from the throne and chose his brother, Joseph, to be the new king. “Next, Bonaparte made the major error of having his brother Joseph chosen as the new king by the large party of French-loving reformists, a move that sent the peasantry and church into a rebellious frenzy” (“Moore”). Within two months, the rebellions ascended into one brutal war called the Peninsular War.
Along with the conflict, Goya’s wife passed away, putting him in a time of complete mental and emotional distress.

He created a series of paintings called The Disasters of War, dedicated to the sufferings of the Spanish during the time. The Third of May 1808, painted in 1814, is by far Goya’s most famous piece in the collection. The painting reveals the true horrors of the battlefield as the French army attacks and kills innocent Spanish troops protecting their city in the uprising at Medina del Rio Seco. “Even though Goya had shown French sympathies in the past, the slaughter of his countrymen and the horrors of war made a profound impression on the artist” (“Zappella”). The darkness of the piece shows the threatening destruction of the troops. Goya also uses intense emotion in the piece, especially in the facial expressions of the Spanish. Each of them have distinct looks that show signs of fear, plead, and sorrow, while the French continue to shoot, showing no

mercy.
In his final years , Goya withdrew from the public and lived in solitude in his home, where we worked on his Black Paintings series from 1819-1823. Still suffering from the illness and old age, Goya was in a dark time of his life, which was apparent through signs of madness in his series.
Saturn Devouring His Son was a rendition of a Roman myth where Saturn feared one of his children would once overthrow him, just like he overthrew his father, and ate each of them at their birth. The painting displays Saturn disturbingly feeding on a head of his child.