Original subtitles

Translisco Goya has often been described as the last of the Great Old Masters and

the first of the new.

He painted sublime portraits of the Spanish royal court and celebratory pictures of the

good life in Spain, but he also produced some of the most harrowing images of human

cruelty ever created.

His work is a compelling mixture of public documentation and private nightmare, can also

make the stomach churn in its uncompromising bleakness and power.

Not much is known of Goya's early life as a painter, but he seems to have followed

the fairly conventional path.

The son of a master Gilder, Goya was born on the 30th of March 1746, in front

and toadoss, a small provincial village in central Spain.

He began his artistic studies at the age of 13, with the local artist Jose Luthan, in

nearby Zaragoza.

In time on a fashiony travel to Italy, in 1770, to acquaint himself with the old masters

and classical antiquity.

And on his return to Spain, he got his first commission to paint a vault in the LP-like

cathedral in Zaragoza.

Adoration of the name of God, painted in 1772 when Goya was just 26, is clearly influenced

by the Baroque style, he'd seen on his travels, with angels supported by billowing clouds,

surrounding the name of God, here written in a triangle to symbolise the Trinity in Hebrew.

In 1773, at the age of 27, Goya married your sefer by you, sister Francesca by you, then

a rising star at the Spanish Royal Court, and it was to help Goya in the coming years.

But Goya's marriage was played with tragedy, of the eight children that he had, only one,

Havie, would survive into adulthood.

Professionally, though, Goya's horizons were about to expand.

At the beginning of 1775, with Goya approaching his 29th birthday, he came to the city that would

define him as an artist, Madrid.

The city was undergoing a transformation at the King Charles III.

Many artists were attracted to the city, and with the extensive building and city planning and progress,

Madrid was fast becoming a picturesque city of international stature.

Within a year of arriving in Madrid, Goya produced a series of paintings

of which this is among the most celebrated, it's called the picnic, and it shows an idyllic scene

on the banks of the River Mandonaris just outside Madrid, where a group of characters are indulging

in an afternoon's frolicking. And it also shows two social types, myos and myas.

They're from the lower classes, they're artisans, sometimes they're on the verge of criminality,

but they're free spirits, as you can see, flaggons of wine are being consumed, they've eaten,

and then they're lounging around in the sun, flirting, as putting arrives in the form of viscifier,

the orange cellar, who shows a wears, but at the same time, flirts and gestures off into the distance,

as if to say to one of the men, come with me if you want. But the whole purpose of this painting

isn't just an idyllic celebration nor is it to show Goya's amazing facility as a young artist.

This painting had another purpose. In fact, it was a cartoon or a study for a tapestry.

In the 18th century, the tapestry was immensely prized by Spanish aristocrats,

who not only used it for decoration, but looked to it as denoting social status

and wealth. Goya got the job at the Royal Tapestry Manufactory on the recommendation of his brother-in-law,

Francisco Bajo. Here Goya and other artists produced the designs that would be copied onto the

manufacturing looms. The images tended to be portraits of country life, of sport and other

enistic pursuits, but it wasn't long before Goya started to introduce an edgian note into his work.

In this picture called the blind guitarist, the grotesquely painted figure of the musician

begins to play in front of a group of well-to-do folk out for their stroll. In contrast to the

shadowy figure of the musician, a man in a dazzling yellow coat reaches into his pocket for a coin

with which to fob off the busker, but he can't be so easily brushed aside and nor will he disappear

from Goya's future work, where their develops a contrast of light and dark, of the frivolous

and the more sinister side of human life. But there's also a growing ambition and scale in Goya's work,

evident in this tapestry design created in 1788. It's called the meadow of Sanizidro

and shows the city of Madrid celebrating the feast of its patron saint. Goya described the work as

his most arduous challenge to date, a painting of some seven and a half meters in length,

showing feasting, frolicking figures on the backs of the man's and are as river,

with the city visible in the distance. The design, though, never made it into a tapestry,

due to the death of the king for whose palace it was intended. Instead, it was bought by the

Duke and Duchess of Asuna. With his election to the royal academy in Madrid in 1880, Goya was

able to find the support of aristocrats such as these, and this portrait of the Asuna family,

painted in 1789, is typical of the many that Goya did throughout his career,

showing the wealthy patrons in all their finery. Goya had rapidly become the painter of Spanish

society, the most sought after portraitist in the city and beyond. But privately, he was having

doubts about his success, fearful of the fact that he may have been merely selling out to the market.

And then, in 1792, whilst travelling to Andaluthia to visit friends, Goya became seriously ill,

the exact nature of his illness isn't known, but it lasted several months, and left him

profoundly deaf for the rest of his life. Whilst he was recuperating from his illness,

Goya began to work in a much more radical and experimental way. In a series of 14 small paintings

made on tin, and which he referred to as his cabinet pictures, Goya wrestled with the

unpredictability of human existence, where life can be snuffed out at any moment, and where sanity

in reason can easily descend into a pit of madness. But if the cabinet paintings seemed powerful

arenas in which Goya's imagination began to run right, they were nothing in comparison

to his first great graphic series, produced through the 1790s, and finally published in 1799,

80 images called Loss Capricious. Loss Capricious or the Capricious is a kaleidoscope of human

delusion and weakness. Here, Goya rips into the world around him, the vanity, pomposity,

and stupidity of Spanish society. No one would escape from his savagely satirical gaze.

Flectuating between the natural and the unnatural, Goya produced a collection of images,

the like of which had never been seen before. Loss surprisingly, the public response to Loss

Capricious reigns from incomprehension to outrage. From the first edition of 300, Goya sold

less than 60 sets, later, as an old man, he said he would drew it from public sale because he

feared the Spanish inquisition. However, the work was to fuel much of the best and darkest work

for the rest of his life. Goya still needed to earn a living, though, and returned to painting

large-scale portraits. The Duchess of Alba was one of the most compelling women in Spain,

and she became Goya's most famous model, and his passion at love. Here, the Duchess is

glad in the costume of the Mayan, a dress which had become fashionable with the aristocracy at that time.

An inscribed on a two-rings are their names, Alba and Goya, which points down to her feet

with which she seems to have written in the sand, Sologoya, only Goya. But whether Goya's

infatuation with the Duchess was ever reciprocated, is unknown. The Duchess of Alba was instrumental

in making this particular part of Madrid, a fashionable war because she bought land here on the banks

and the river Manzanaris, and this church that of Santonio de la Florida became the

court church, and in the summer of 1798, Goya was given the job of decorating the ceiling.

The commission itself was a relatively traditional one, but Goya's response was anything but.

The subject is that of the 13th century legend of Santonio of Padua, who appeared during

a court hearing in his native city of Lisbon, in order to save his father, who'd been unjustly

accused of murder. But the Saints bidding the dead man came back to life to accuse the real murderer.

But the Mayan action seems almost overshadowed by the surrounding crowd, a motley crew of

vagabonds and blind beggars, hardly the normal depiction of floating angels that we normally find

in Baroque church frescos. In spite of the grotesque nature of some of the Santonio

murals and indeed of the Capricios, Goya's reputation in royal circles was never higher,

and in 1799, he was appointed principal co-painter, and a year later, in 1800, he was commissioned

to paint what became perhaps the greatest royal group portrait of the 19th century.

It shows King Charles IV and his extended family, 14 almost life-sized figures,

but are each individuals in their own right. And in the way that Goya paints, the decorations,

the sashes, the silk and brocade shimmer of the dresses, he's a kind of miracle in itself,

as you get close up though, those details dissolve into a miasma of brushstrokes and the

message seems to be, keep your distance, which reaffirms if you like, the royal dignity or

authority. At the heart of the painting is the queen, Mary Louise, who forms this pivot as

a kind of triangle with a husband, King Charles, and then has sung the Crown Prince Ferdinand.

And all the other figures are really there just as bit-part players. People have looked at this

work and tried to read into it the idea that Goya may be caricaturering the family.

This I think is wrong, it's also slightly unfair. The Bourbons were notoriously ugly, and people

pointed out in particular that the queen is no oil painting to use the cliché. But in fact,

I find this image rather tender, but what gives the painting its real edge is the presence of

Goya. On the left hand side, depicting himself in the act of painting the picture. And of course,

this is a direct homage to the greatest royal group portrait ever made by Velasquez Goya's great

idea that Goya is a schizophrenic artist of kind, but there are two sides to him that he has

this light side, the side that is the traditional and official court painter. But also he has

this private introspective in prison side, the dark side, and it's this dark, dangerous,

sometimes erotic, sometimes political vision that dominates the second half of Goya's career.

This is one of the most famous pairs of paintings in the history of art.

The first of two celebrated pictorial double acts that Goya did at the beginning of the

19th century, and it shows a woman in exactly the same pose, one cloth, the other naked.

Art historians locate this work somewhere between Titians Venus of Obino and Manage Olympia,

but it's probably closer to the truth to say that Goya was more inspired by the last

business great image of the rugby Venus owned by the Spanish Prime Minister of Goya's day

manual goodoy, who it's widely believed commissioned these works from Goya.

She looks at us unflinchingly as we look at her, and that draws people into the picture

and to wonder who this woman might be, and some said it was the Duchess of Alba, but it's clearly

not her. And others have speculated it might have been good or his mistress, but I think the best

we're reading the work is as an embodiment of a modern and increasingly liberated Spanish woman.

The picture after all is called the naked Maya, the artisan with a liberal free spirit,

and I think it's that that Goya's getting at, but she lies openly displaying her body with no hint

of shame whatsoever. In the dress version, her body's hidden, but her sexuality becomes more

emphasised. You see the curves in more pronounced ways. Also, the costume is Turkish, those golden

slippers, and there's a kind of exoticism to the work.

Images of reclining nude women have a long and distinguished history in art, but not in Spain,

when the inquisition is raging. In fact, King Charles III wanted to burn all the images of

nude women in the royal collection. Now, there's been some very interesting speculation about how these

two works would have been displayed in Goya's collection. Some people have come with a theory that

there was even a kind of mechanical device that had dressed woman, and then it flips up to reveal

the undress woman underneath, rather like those pens that adolescence have that when you turn

the woman's clothes slowly fall off. I'm not sure that that happened, but I do think that having

a dress image next to an undress image gives them more erotic free sight even though the implication

was that by covering her up, you added respect to ability. And it was good, I painted here by Goya

in 181, who put into motion events that would throw Spain into turmoil, and inspired Goya

to create some of his greatest works. In 188, Goya and given Napoleon Bonaparte free passage through

Spain on his way to Portugal, effectively delivering his country into French hands.

Napoleon forced the King to abdicate and put his brother, Joseph Bonaparte on the throne.

Revolt soon broke out throughout the country, and a brutal guerrilla war began.

The war didn't just take place on battlefields, it took place in the towns and cities of Spain too.

Where insurrection was brutally put down, and so there were newspaper reports and verbal accounts,

but also Goya would have seen some of the atrocities. And this led him to produce what is

still one of the most powerful indictments of human conflict ever made. His second great graphic

series, the disasters of war. Goya had initially been encouraged to depict the glorious

deeds of the Spanish against the French armies, but the series of 80 prints are a total indictment

of war and tyranny. Saying an rational man become little more than savage beasts in a world

where human barbarity seems endless. There's nothing noble Goya seems to be saying in a struggle

where the defenseless, a raped, mutilated, executed, and their corpses piled high like a garbage

dump. Goya's series of etchings predate war photography by over a century, but many still argue

that their power and impact have never been equaled.

Some of the graphic horrors explored and depicted by Goya and the disasters of war were used for the

basis of two extraordinary paintings that in a way are the first war or anti war oil paintings

of the modern era. It begins with this work called the second of May, produced by Goya in 1814,

looking back over the events that had taken place six years before.

And the image starts with a scene where the French troops are sent in to

quote a growing mob riot as the mob tries to stop the Spanish royal family from leaving Madrid

and effectively leaving them open to French rule. And in a way you'd say this is an heroic

image of the heroicism of the people, but actually the central impact of the work is one of chaos

and confusion. And then Goya switches gear in this painting where we're asked to make the narrative

leap in our minds, and here there is a tremendously harrowing frozen image of retribution, a

rounded up, and they face a firing squad. And you can pick out some of the major protagonists

in the previous painting here in this work with a figure here in the foreground, lying in a sticky

pool of blood. Clearly recognizable as the figure in the right hand foreground and the second of May

stabbing a horse, and the man illuminated facing the firing squad staring, unflinchingly at them.

The look of horror on his face is also visible as the man stabbing the French soldier who seems

to be suspended in thin air in the previous painting. And then we have this amazingly anonymous

machine-like firing squad, they're back to us, partly inviting us to look over their shoulders

and cast ourselves in the role of aggressors. It's a fantastically staged but claustrophobic

image. The hill pushing on a one side, the darkness descending on another, and then this eerie

glow from the lantern that illuminates the figure, and in a way, gives the central image

the strongest resonance, because look at the pose of the figure there. Arms out, and look at

his palms, and you see blood marks, the stick marker, the Christ-like figure, and this is an image

of martyrdom. And of course what Goya is doing in these pictures is proclaiming that this is

the horrors of war writ large, or painted on the larger scale that Goya can muster, and secondly,

and more politically, by 1814, for Spain, the French and Napoleon in particular, is cast as the

mighty Christ. With the war over, Goya came under investigation for his collaboration with the

French, as he and other liberals had initially welcomed what they saw as progressive reform.

So Goya faced the inquisition, which had been reinstated by the new, despotic king,

further than at the 7th. Although no charges were ever brought against Goya,

and he managed to keep his position as a court painter, as well as his annual salary,

no further royal commissions ever came his way. And whilst all this was going on, Goya was

also struck with a personal loss, in 1812, his wife, your safford died. A few years later,

in 1819, now in his mid-70s, Goya bought a small house just outside Madrid,

called Quinter del Sordo, or the house of the death man. There he lived with his new companion

and housekeeper, the Arcadia vise, and a daughter. Once again, Goya became seriously ill,

but on his recovery, he started to paint a series of works directly onto the walls of two rooms

in the house, which are known to us today as the black paintings. This painting seems to have been

dug from the depths of Goya's Gothic imagination, but it also has its precedence in classical

mythology, and in the art of the more recent past, but here in Goya's hands, the thing is

much more monstrous. The story goes that Saturn was told by Mother Earth, that his children would

eventually use serpent, and so, he bites the heads of each and every one of them to kill them as

an act of kind of self-preservation. But here, the image that Goya gives us isn't of a God in control.

In fact, he's lost the plot. He's unbalanced and unhinged, and when the work was first painted on

the wall of the house of the death man, it's spotted a full erection, an horrendous image of

sexual gratification, where Saturn is presented as life-giver, as well as life-taker, but either through

censorship or when the works were transferred onto canvas and then brought here to the Prado,

that was lost. And what we have with this God of Melancholy is a dark, brooding horrific scene that

perhaps mirrors something of the pessimism and sense of imprisonment that Goya himself is feeling.

Here Goya returns to a scene that he painted some 32 years earlier, that of Sun is

hidro, but the happy picnicas are now replaced by something much gloomier. The pilgrims

cluster together, their mouths gaping wide open on their distorted faces as they try to sing,

and suddenly individual rational beings seem lost in a seething, irrational mass of humanity.

With Spain still in ongoing political turmoil, Goya decided to go into exile. He petitioned

the king for permission to visit France for reasons of health, and it was given, and so Goya

headed to Bordeaux. And it was while he was living in Bordeaux, that Goya produced his last major oil

painting this one, called The Milk-Made of Bordeaux, showing a doy-eyed, slightly melancholic woman,

staring off into space with a milk-churn on the left-hand side of the picture, on which Goya has

scratched his name as an artist of 81. And some people have interpreted this work as a sign that

in his old age, he's increasingly experimental, and to a certain extent, he was, and they say that

this work in its brush strokes, in its looseness, in this hazy impressionism, and anticipates the

works of French artists later on in the century. But I think perhaps that's overstating the case,

for me, the strongest feeling that you get from this work is nostalgia, but also of a man who's

found some kind of peace, harmony, and resolution in his life. When I look at it, I'm reminded

of the young man who came to Madrid, who made those studies or cartoons for the tapestries,

a frolics, and picnics. And here, if you like, the careers come for the circle.

A year after completing The Milk-Made, Goya died in Bordeaux on the 16th April, 1828.

He was 82, but in 1901, his body was returned to Spain, and buried in the hermitage of San Antonio de la

Florida in Madrid, the very church, where a century earlier, he'd painted his frescoes.

Goya's a pivotal figure in the history of art, an artist who reinvigorated traditional

portraiture and religious devotional imagery. But ultimately it was Goya's unflinching vision

that set him apart from almost any other painter in history, that searing uncompromising gaze

that enabled him to see and depict human frailty, with an unprecedented directness and power,

which arguably has never yet been surpassed.