GOYA’S MADRID Spain’s capital seen through the eyes of its greatest painter By CHRISTIAN VIVEROS-FAUNÉ Photography by MIGUEL FLORES-VIANNA Francisco Goya’s The Burial of the Sardine, painted circa 1808 to 1812, depicts a ritual that celebrates the end of carnival. Facing page, from top: Madrid’s Puerta del Sol; the chapel of San Antonio de la Florida, where Goya is buried
The fight in the Puerta del Sol, as Goya pictured it, recalls recent news footage from Hong Kong, Cairo and Ferguson, Missouri. On one side are Madrid’s civilians in their street suits and work clothes; on the other, the Mamluks in their exotic turbans and loose pants, clutching scimitars. History tells us that the event sparked Spain’s War of Independence against Napoleon. But Goya’s painting The Second of May 1808 tells us much more. As opposed to the chiselled, Neoclassical heroes and aristocrats painted by his French contemporary Jacques-Louis David, Goya here portrays Madrid in crisis being rescued by el pueblo – the little people. Indeed, Madrid’s municipal archives list the fallen during the incident as shoemakers, gardeners, bakers, locksmiths, carpenters, coachmen and students. Painters have long been identified with the cities in which they work and live: Picasso had Paris; Hopper had New York. But there is a special case to be made for Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828). The Spanish master was a career flatterer of the era’s rich and famous, but he was also a passionate painter of everyday folk. As is visible today from the street signs and the metro station that bear his name, few other artists in history are as synonymous with their city as Goya is with Madrid. The Spanish have never taken Goya for granted. Although a painter like Vermeer toiled in Delft’s placid burgherdom all his life, eight of his 36 known paintings can be found in Manhattan’s Upper East Side today. Goya, on the other hand, was fortunate enough to have most of his works remain in Madrid for nearly two centuries, making Spain’s vibrant 400-year-old capital a virtual open-air monument to the genius of its greatest painter (alongside Velázquez). This stroke of good luck – and protective curation – does not mean that all of Goya’s iconic pictures are easily found in one place. One of the finest adventures a traveller can have in this age of Oneworld alliances is to comb the bustling precincts of Madrid on a scavenger hunt for Goya’s masterpieces. GOYA WAS BORN to a middle-class family in Fuendetodos, a small Aragonese town near Zaragoza, northeast of Madrid on the A2 highway. When he was in his late twenties, his unconventional ambition took him to the capital, where he first served the Spanish monarch as a cartoonist – in the lingo of the time, a maker of preparatory pictures on cardboard, or cartón, for tapestries that insulated the chilly walls of royal palaces like El Escorial and El Pardo. (Both sites can easily be reached from Madrid by car or public transport.) Goya’s professional ascent, when it came, was accompanied by political upheaval, illness and war. The painter represented these with the same brio he devoted to his youthful cartoons of brassy, lower-class majos and majas (the era’s hiphop rebels) in open-air scenes that depict sport, shopping and flirtation – the capital’s main pastimes then as now. As the late critic Robert Hughes observed, the breadth of Goya’s career can be conveyed in two canvases, created 30 turbulent years apart. The paintings, The San Isidro Meadow and The San Isidro Pilgrimage, are both superstars of the Prado, the Madrid institution that boasts the world’s largest collection of Goya artworks. While both capture the popular May 15 feast day of San Isidro, they couldn’t be more different in spirit. The first, painted in 1788, in the first flush of the artist’s success, shows Goya’s courtly fellow citizens partying atop a hill above the Manzanares river. The other, which hangs in the spotlit galleries the Prado reserves for Goya’s Pinturas Negras, or Black Paintings, CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 95
