Oh, my dear friend, why such a deep furrow in your brow? What could you possibly be peering at with such intensity? Ah, an art book. And Francisco de Goya, no less. You’ve chosen a potent, heart-scorching medicine, heavy with the weight of human karma. Very well, if you aren’t too bored, would you mind listening to me for a while? Don’t worry, I won’t do anything as boorish as preaching. It’s just that when I look at the life of this old Spanish painter, I see something that feels far from a stranger’s story—a comical, yet tear-stained “truth” of humanity that reveals itself to us.
First, I want you to know that this man, Goya, wasn’t always a gloomy hermit painting those terrifying “Black Paintings.” Quite the contrary. In his youth, he was a clump of insufferable ambition, scrambling frantically up the social ladder, dreaming of the glittering status of a Court Painter. He designed tapestry cartoons, beautifying the cheerful commoners of Madrid and coating scenes of men and women playing under the bright sun in colors as sweet as candy. He wanted to rise. He wanted money. He wanted to be recognized by kings and nobles and to ride around in a luxurious carriage. Don’t you find that wonderfully human? Such a lovable, worldly man.
However, the Heavens have a wicked sense of humor. Just when you are basking in the glow of smooth sailing, they love to douse you with cold water from behind. At the age of forty-six, Goya collapsed from a mysterious, severe illness and completely lost his hearing. Imagine it. All the lively court gossip, the beautiful music, the whispers of women—everything that had been so vibrant suddenly vanished, replaced by a silence as deep as the bottom of the sea. “Despair” is too small a word for it. Yet, this is where Goya—and the true fascination of a human being—really begins.
In a world where sound had died, his eyes began to capture things they had never seen before. Or perhaps, things he had refused to see. He likely felt there was no longer any need to paint royalty and nobility with a flattering brush. His strokes began to ruthlessly expose the hideous inner lives of the powerful, the foolishness of the masses, and the monsters lurking in the deepest recesses of his own soul. Look at that famous portrait, The Family of Charles IV. Even though he is painting the royal family, what we see are people with vanity and incompetence plastered on their faces—looking like a somewhat dim-witted family of bakers. To deliver such a thing to the palace with a straight face… Goya was a formidable man, wasn’t he? Or perhaps he just had a very sharp sense of irony.
Then, the tragedy of the war that ravaged Spain transformed him even further. You know the painting The Third of May 1808, don’t you? The citizens being executed and the mechanical, faceless soldiers. What is depicted there is not the noble aesthetic of martyrdom. It is simply the raw terror and absurdity of human beings dying miserably, like mud. Goya threw away the sugar-coating of “beauty” and reached out to grab the very heart of reality with his bare hands.
In his final years, the “Black Paintings” he scrawled onto the walls of his own home are nothing short of breathtaking. Something like Saturn Devouring His Son seems like the work of a madman. A giant ripping apart and eating his own child in the darkness. But you, my friend, must not dismiss this as mere insane delusion. This is a brutally honest depiction of the cruel monster called Time that we all carry within us, or perhaps the inherent violence of self-preservation.
What I want to convey to you, more than the fact that Goya was a great artist, is how he committed a “double suicide” with his true self and the ugly reality of the world. Everyone harbors the vanity of wanting to appear better than they are. But perhaps the true light is found only within that silence—the kind of silence that makes you want to cover your ears—which remains after that vanity has been stripped away. It was precisely because Goya became deaf that he was able to hear the true screams of the world. It is an ironic, yet grace-filled paradox.
Now, why don’t you turn the pages of that book once more? Don’t those grotesque monsters Goya painted start to look somewhat humorous, even familiar? They are mirrors of ourselves. The tenacity of an old painter who failed, was betrayed, fell ill, and yet never stopped swinging his brush at the canvas… It may not be “stylish,” but I believe it is the most beautiful sight a human can offer. You, too, should remember Goya when you find yourself at a dead end. At the very bottom of despair, the most interesting “pictures” are often hidden away.