Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

has identified three groups of pictorial commentaries: five paintings comment on
Goya’s personality and his relationship with his mistress Leocadia; seven express
the artist’s vision of Spain of his day; two affirm Goya’s own destiny and
integrate the meaning of the collection as a whole (ibid). Buero often projects two
or three paintings at a time in order to relate the personal subjects to those that
comment on the political situation in Spain, thus connecting Spain’s superstition
and ignorance and Goya’s entrapment.
For example, by showing Leocadia and the Aquelarre together, Buero
connects Goya’s personal feeling of entrapment and betrayal by his housekeeper
and mistress Leocadia with a comment on contemporary Spain as world of horror.
King Fernando VII is here both associated with the black he-goat of the Aquelarre
(The Witches’ Sabbath) and with Saturn, who devours his own children. This
painting is projected when Leocadia tells doctor Arrieta about her fears that Goya
is mad; it reappears when Goya looks through his telescope to Fernando VII’s
palace, and again when the Royal Volunteers, sent by the king, come to torture
him. Buero’s repeated use of the Saturn thus portrays the king as source of fear
and violence and underscores his threat to those he should protect. Similar to
Godard’s use of the Picasso portraits, then, Buero uses Goya’s Pinturas negras as
visual commentaries on a visual-verbal scene. In this dramatic ekphrasis, the
paintings comment on the scene and dialogs just as the dramatic action reflects
back on the interpretation of the images.
In the various forms of dramatic ekphrasis, then, the competition between
the ekphrastic medium (literary text or film) and the visual source is the strongest,
69