I’ve been reading avidly about Goya’s life and work. My source, The World of Goya 1746-1828, by Richard Schickel (Time-Life), is old, 1968, but I don’t care, and I don’t even care if there are facts we’ve since revised, newer generally accepted opinions about Goya and the authorship of works attributed to him, and primary sources since found. Because I’m reading not to get the facts but to get an impression of the facts.
It’s like drawing. When you draw you’re not rendering an exact likeness; that would just be pointless since a camera can always do that better anyway. Instead, you’re rendering an impression that’s rooted in the artist and in the moment the impression is made. So that’s a distinction between two types of reading and a related one between two methods of generating art. But reading about Goya has led me to think briefly about distinctions between his Caprichos and his painted portraits and then, by extension, to think about whether Goya was more of a painter or an illustrator, and next to consider whether Goya was more of an illustrator than other Spanish painters, and finally to consider if there is any meaningful difference between those two words anyway.
I wanted to make my musings a little more concrete so I compared Goya with the other two well-known artists to come out of pre-contemporary Spain: Diego Velázquez and Domenicos Theotokopoulos, or El Greco, the Greek. (I didn’t bother with Murillo or Ribera or Coello in the interest of keeping things simple.)
Vulcan's Forge (Diego Velázquez, 1630)
When I think of Velázquez I imagine great sweeping canvases masterfully composed, with vibrant colors offset against swooping black shapes. I think of spotlit subject matter, the way the torsos of Bacchus and Vulcan are lit up by some unknown magnificent source. Velázquez tells you where to look and even lights it up for you. The words that come up for me in relation to his work are (a) perfect, (b) vibrant, and (c) controlled.
La Agoria en el Jardín (El Greco, 1590)
The word I get for El Greco is motion. His paintings even make your eyes move with them. The figures stretch and reach. His brush stroke is long and fluid. The movement gives these paintings a freedom and looseness you don’t see in Velázquez, but El Greco shares with that painter a love of rich color, a commitment to composition, and an enjoyment of paint. In the case of both of these great painters you feel that they are working to commemorate the spirit of a moment or event in paint. You are moved by the historical or religious context that the painter consciously evokes.
Detail of Dome of San Antonio de la Florida (Francisco Goya, 1798)
I can’t say that about Goya. When I look at his work, I am thinking mostly about the people in it. His populist approach was in keeping with the time period–he painted about a century later than El Greco and Velázquez–which coincided with the end of the Enlightenment. Through painting and drawing and etching, Goya was telling the story of the people in his work. When he painted the dome of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida with the story of St. Anthony’s miracle, he didn’t approach it as his predecessors might have, emphasizing the miracle and its meaning. Instead, he painted the people who were witnessing it and participating in it. The emphasis is on their varied, believable reactions. His brush strokes, even as they are looser and more “impressionistic” than those of Velázquez, are used in the service of conveying the realness of their clothes or their gestures or their facial expressions. He even adds a faux railing around the dome to give the people in the painting something to lean against, something to keep them from falling into the laps of the viewers below.
Shootings on Third of May (Goya, 1808)
Even when Goya is painting a historical event, such as the executions in The Third of May, what we are presented with is not the emotion of the experience in a grand, highly composed painting, the intention of which is to make us have the appropriate human response to a particular war. Instead, we are looking into the face of a specific man who is just about to die.
And that difference between Goya and the other two Spanish masters is the one that I was detecting unconsciously I believe when I thought the word illustration. Because when we are illustrating a story we are often approaching the task of painting or drawing differently than when depicting an event or a mood. When illustrating, I at least am thinking about the people or the animals or the trees in the story. I’m thinking about the specifics of their experience, their story, and not directly the larger implications on the human timeline, even if that is the context within which I am responding to the characters, even if that is the subconscious conversation I am having with art or history or literature. My focus is on so and so sitting in that chair.
I am unconcerned about medium in this analysis. I am unconcerned with subject matter. What I am talking about is the artist’s focus, what each of these three men was really looking at on the canvas or the copper plate. The differences among them certainly have a great deal to do with when they came along. But you could also say that had Goya, with his particular skill in what I am calling illustration, come around earlier, he might not have been appreciated the way he was later at a time when so much of what had seemed reasonable and orderly and in keeping with the desired, natural progression of humanity was beginning to fall apart. And even he with the publication of his Caprichos (my book rather dramatically calls them “Chilling Scenes from a Private Hell”) took a beating of sorts, failing to sell many of the quantity he produced despite the low price and his high standing. Through and through, Goya, masterful painter, was an illustrator, interested in the story of the person facing him and his canvas.
