Goya and the Mystery of Reading

Luis Martín-Estudillo

Description

Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) lived through an era of profound societal change. One of the transformations that he engaged passionately was the unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available. He documented and questioned this reading revolution in some of his most captivating paintings, prints, and drawings.

Goya and the Mystery of Reading explores the critical impact this transition had on the work of an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to see it anew—to read it. Goya's creations offer a sustained reflection on the implications of reading, which he depicted as an ambiguous, often mysterious activity: one which could lead to knowledge or ecstasy, to self-fulfillment or self-destruction, to piety or perdition. At the same time, he used reading to elicit new possibilities of interpretation. This book reveals for the first time the historical, intellectual, and artistic underpinnings of reading as one of the pillars of his art.

This book is the recipient of the 2023 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.
Author's Note

Introduction: Francisco de Goya and the Reading Revolutions

Chapter 1: Reading and Politics

Chapter 2: Reading and the Self

Chapter 3: Reading, Leisure, and Sensuality

Chapter 4: Reading and the Contours of the Human

Afterword: Words Written at the Edge of Shadows

Notes

Bibliography

Image Credits

Index

Sujets

• Social History
• Histoire
• Peninsular War
• Spain
• Romanticism
• Francisco Goya
• Art
• Spain (groupe)
• History
• Enlightenment
• Goya

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826505347
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 34 Mo

Extrait

GOYA AND THE MYSTERY OF READING
Goya and the Mystery of Reading
LUIS MARTÍN-ESTUDILLO
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2023 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2023
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Martín-Estudillo, Luis, author.
Title: Goya and the mystery of reading / Luis Martín-Estudillo.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022045772 (print) | LCCN 2022045773 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826505323 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826505330 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826505347 (epub) | ISBN 9780826505354 (adobe pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Goya, Francisco, 1746-1828—Criticism and interpretation. | Books and reading in art.
Classification: LCC N7113.G68 M37 2023 (print) | LCC N7113.G68 (ebook) | DDC 759.6--dc23/eng/20221021
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045772
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045773
For B. & J.—mystery readers
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction. Francisco de Goya and the Reading Revolutions
1. Reading and Politics
2. Reading and the Self
3. Reading, Leisure, and Sensuality
4. Reading and the Contours of the Human
Afterword. Words Written at the Edge of Shadows
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Acknowledgments
Index
Author’s Note
A preliminary version of section two in Chapter 1 appeared as “Real presencia, soberana atención: La Junta de Filipinas de Goya” in issue 374 (January–March 2021) of the journal Goya , published by the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano. I appreciate their permission to reprint it as well as their generosity with material belonging to their remarkable collection.
To facilitate reading, I have modernized the spelling and punctuation throughout, including Goya’s captions. (His spelling was very volatile, as was the case with most writers of Spanish at the time). All translations are my own unless stated otherwise in the bibliography; the original quotes are included in the notes.
INTRODUCTION
Francisco de Goya and the Reading Revolutions
Reading fascinated the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828). Throughout his long career he never ceased observing and recreating this complex activity, which appears in a number of his most ambitious, groundbreaking works. In some, reading is depicted explicitly, as in his Los Caprichos series, whose plate 29 both satirizes those who made the activity a vacuous form of social distinction and at the same time offers an alternative. This caption, This Is Indeed Reading , implicitly—and quite obsequiously—identifies the discerning spectator as a truly sophisticated reader, unlike the ludicrous dandy feigning self-cultivation by confronting a text with his eyes shut. We also find readers in his celebrated Black Paintings (in one of them we see the Devil himself, incarnated as a billy goat, lecturing to a sinister-looking group of followers from a book) and in other experimental “essays” (his own word), such as the lithographs and works on ivory that he, ever the innovator, created toward the end of his life. In other images, reading is less evident at first, yet Goya makes it significant all the same. Such is the case in his distressing The Inquisition Tribunal , where the artist has us witness different reactions to the pronouncement of a sentence by the same draconian institution he himself once faced, or in the enormous canvas for the Royal Company of the Philippines—an underexamined masterwork in which Goya dismantles the genre of history painting. The theme also appears repeatedly in the most private portion of his output, his drawings, which behind their seeming simplicity present interpretative challenges that are comparable to those of his “greater” works.
Goya’s unusual attention to reading must be related to the unprecedented growth during his lifetime both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available. He witnessed how the intensive reading of a small number of texts by a minority of the population, which had been a constant in European culture for centuries, quickly gave way to an abundance of readings and readers, characterized at the time as a “fever,” “epidemic,” or “furor.” “Books upon books! What madness!” we read in Rousseau’s Emile . “As all Europe is full of books, Europeans regard them as necessary, forgetting that they are unknown throughout three-quarters of the globe.” 1 It was a genuine reading revolution . 2 This phenomenal change contributed greatly to animating the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Goya’s interest in this transition nourished key aspects of his art, going far beyond a simple reflection of what he saw and experienced. It had a critical impact on his work, that of an artist whose ambition was not to copy the world around him, but to interpret it—to read it.
That world in which Goya saw ever more readers engaging with ever more texts revealed itself to him as also a world that was itself legible, as were its inhabitants. It was all a large, mysterious book in which he would come to inscribe his own work. Along these lines, he found himself in agreement with some of the brightest minds of his time. Aside from participating in the furor that the deluge of print matter caused, Goya and many others were captivated by the notion that everything around them was legible, even if it wasn’t codified alphabetically: “Nature is my book,” wrote his friend the poet Juan Meléndez Valdés. 3 They approached as texts anything from the signs of the cosmos to human figures, often following physiognomic principles that claimed to comprehend the spirits animating those bodies by reading their faces. “I have read it in his body, he didn’t know he had such skill,” Goya wrote in a letter, explaining why he had encouraged a colleague to try painting miniature portraits. 4
Yet it was the wide dissemination of print matter, from books in every format to newspapers and chapbooks, and the corresponding transformation of reading habits, that produced the most intense debates on the topic in Spain and the West at large. By the middle of the eighteenth century, reading had ceased to be an almost cryptic practice, the patrimony of just a few. For the enlightened journalist José Clavijo, this expansion was a sign that “those barbaric centuries, when even the ability to read was seen as something belonging to a certain class of people,” were coming to an end. 5 While some influential individuals close to the artist celebrated the expansion of reading as a fundamental step toward the emancipation of humankind (as was the case with the poet Manuel J. Quintana, author of an ode “To the Invention of the Printing Press”), others worried about it. It was as if suddenly all sorts of texts appeared to be everywhere, and everyone seemed to be reading something. “Even porters are buying the Gaceta ,” the clergyman and scholar Pedro Estala reported from Madrid in 1794; twenty years later, he had to flee the Inquisition for having translated Rousseau’s The Social Contract . 6 Rulers, priests, and physicians were among those concerned about the public management of reading and the effects it might cause. Their apprehension was nothing new: Plato had already seen problems attendant to the diffusion of reading more than two millennia earlier. In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella approved the first measures aimed at controlling the production and trade of books in 1502. Failure to comply could bring with it the death penalty. A range of restrictions on reading remained in place for centuries. In 1767, one such measure prohibited the printing of several popular genres perceived as harmful. Another aimed to prevent the collapse of the ancien régime that certain texts arriving from cities beyond the Pyrenees, such as Geneva, seemed to be instigating. 7 A similar prohibition was put in place to curb the immoral effects of a newly fashionable genre: on May 27, 1799, the printing of novels was outlawed. 8 The cordon sanitaire that secular and religious authorities tried to impose around texts considered dangerous was descended from the initiatives against Protestant heresy in previous centuries. These efforts sought to prevent the dissemination of ideas that could lead to political change. They materialized in a strict, though not totalizing, control over the importation, production, sale, and reception of print matter. Readers accepted these circumstances as “the unavoidable dangers surrounding anyone who wants to read,” as Goya’s friend the playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín bemoaned. 9
Even those who were decidedly in favor of the advancement and spreading of knowledge expressed reservations—both aesthetic and moral—about the publishing craze. New restrictive ideas were added to the old dogmas; for instance, that of “utility,” which justified the prohibition of any book “that was not positively useful to the common good.” 10 An enlightened patron of Goya, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos—who was a writer and a censor of books himself, and yet had to confront official attempts to control his own libraries—harbored his own doubts about such widespread book production: “The mania of making books has become close to a furor, and this furor engenders and aborts very many bad books every day for each one that it delivers happily. It is with good reason that people distrust new books and see them as a dangerous meal. . . . [Y]ou could even bet that, for every hundred bad ones, at least fifty of them are so not only in the literary sense, but also in the moral one.” 11
The protection of orthodoxy focused on written texts, but it often incorporated equivalent rules meant to govern visual works. Those in charge of safeguarding moral, political, and religious order understood reading and the viewing of images as two faces of the same dangerous ph