presents a rough rendering of humanity as a mob – el pueblo turned rabble – led by a cockeyed guitarist into a dark horizon. Appointed painter to King Carlos III in 1786, Goya became strangely ill in 1792 and lost his hearing permanently. Whatever the cause of his malady – scholars suspect syphilis or lead poisoning – it caused the painter to leave Madrid for Cadiz to convalesce, according to Manuela Mena, the Prado’s curator of 18th-century painting and Spain’s foremost Goya scholar. By the time the painter returned to Madrid nearly a year later, he was a changed man – thanks in part to his prolonged exposure to several local collections of prints. Goya’s mysterious illness turned his interest in human nature into something even “deeper and more profound,” Mena says. Nowhere is the profoundly introspective Goya more in evidence than on a single wall of the Prado. That’s where The Second of May 1808 and its companion canvas, The Third of May 1808, hang together, attracting scholars and tourist hordes alike. Depicting, respectively, the uprising in the Puerta del Sol and the retaliatory massacre of patriots on Madrid’s Príncipe Pío hill – an area now dominated by a shopping centre that contains a Foot Locker store within musket range of a Zara – these paintings honour the victims of Madrid’s initial skirmishes for independence from Napoleon’s yoke. Just as important, these pitiless scenes also reject the contemporary notion of war as a noble pursuit. Goya’s modern take on 18th-century life in Madrid runs deep at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Spain’s royal academy of painting, which Goya joined in 1780 and led from 1795 to 1797. The Academia displays a dazzling parade of masterworks that include paintings and drawings by Titian, Raphael, Rubens and Zurbarán, and a number of remarkable Goya treasures, like the artist’s letters, his actual gold-leafed painter’s palette and several canvases – including a hilariously rubicund portrait of Prime Minister Manuel Godoy, Spain’s wannabe Thomas Cromwell. Like many of Goya’s portraits, this likeness flatters his subject while capturing a crucial flaw. Fast-forward 215 years and Godoy is a dead ringer for Donald Trump. Sharing the same 18th-century building on Calle de Alcalá is the Calcografía Nacional, which houses Goya’s copper etching plates. Designs from his pessimistic print series, Los Caprichos and La Tauromaquia, cover tourist kiosks, traditional bars and his namesake metro station, a testament to Madrid’s identification with Goya’s empathetically austere vision. Further down Calle de Alcalá, off the Plaza Mayor, is Sobrino de Botín, Spain’s oldest restaurant, which has been roasting a mean suckling pig since 1725. A possibly apocryphal story has a down-at-heels young Francisco washing dishes here before becoming the world-famous Goya. It’s an unlikely scenario, but there is a good chance that the painter ate at the restaurant, since he lived nearby at No 6 Calle Santiago. Moving north, toward the posh shopping district of Salamanca, is the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, a turn-of-the-20thcentury Italianate mansion built by a prominent businessman and filled to bursting with robber baron loot. The museum’s vast wares include prehistoric Iberian objects, manuscripts, jewellery and some of Goya’s eeriest takes on Spanish Gothic – the style the painter adopted to render both his irreligiosity and his distrust of Enlightenment reason. Among the most famous is El Aquelarre, or Witches’ Sabbath: the tablet-sized painting depicts a coven of hags offering newborns and foetuses to a giant he-goat. Goya’s grislier small oils – which compete with Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia’s goriest movie horrors – predate the Victorians’ 96 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM CONTACT CENTURION SERVICE FOR BOOKINGS
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 Clockwise from top left: detail of El Aquelarre (1797–98), at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano; The Threshing Floor; The Second of May 1808, illustrating the clash between rioting Madrileños and Napoleon’s Mamluk squadron; the kitchen at Sobrino de Botín, Spain’s oldest restaurant, where Goya was said to have washed dishes; inside the Royal Tapestry Factory, where a young Goya worked; detail of Goya’s Queen Maria Luisa in Court Dress (1800–01) CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 97
