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Goya

By Jp. A. Calosse

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Length1h 29m

About this audiobook

Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The entrance to his world is not barricaded with technical difficulties. He proved that if a man has the capacity to live and multiply his experiences, to fight and work, he can produce great art without classical decorum and traditional respectability. He was born in 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small mountain village of a hundred inhabitants. As a child he worked in the fields with his two brothers and his sister until his talent for drawing put an end to his misery. At fourteen, supported by a wealthy patron, he went to Saragossa to study with a court painter and later, when he was nineteen, on to Madrid. Up to his thirty-seventh year, if we leave out of account the tapestry cartoons of unheralded decorative quality and five small pictures, Goya painted nothing of any significance, but once in control of his refractory powers, he produced masterpieces with the speed of Rubens. His court appointment was followed by a decade of incessant activity – years of painting and scandal, with intervals of bad health. Goya’s etchings demonstrate a draughtsmanship of the first rank. In paint, like Velázquez, he is more or less dependent on the model, but not in the detached fashion of the expert in still-life. If a woman was ugly, he made her a despicable horror; if she was alluring, he dramatised her charm. He preferred to finish his portraits at one sitting and was a tyrant with his models. Like Velázquez, he concentrated on faces, but he drew his heads cunningly, and constructed them out of tones of transparent greys. Monstrous forms inhabit his black-and-white world: these are his most profoundly deliberated productions. His fantastic figures, as he called them, fill us with a sense of ignoble joy, aggravate our devilish instincts and delight us with the uncharitable ecstasies of destruction. His genius attained its highest point in his etchings on the horrors of war. When placed beside the work of Goya, other pictures of war pale into sentimental studies of cruelty. He avoided the scattered action of the battlefield, and confined himself to isolated scenes of butchery. Nowhere else did he display such mastery of form and movement, such dramatic gestures and appalling effects of light and darkness. In all directions Goya renewed and innovated.

Royalty & Courts Satire Psychological War & Battle Monster Fiction Political Intrigue Dark Fantasy Rebellion Supernatural

Audiobook details

GenreOther

Length1 hr 29 mins

Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices

FormateBook with Audio

LanguageEnglish

1Introduction

62Cannibals Preparing Their Victims

2Biography

63Cannibals Gazing at Their Victims

3Adoration of the Name of God by Angels

64Don Manuel Godoy as Commander in the “War of the Oranges”

4Self-Portrait

65Doña Isabel de Porcel

5Betrothal of the Virgin

66Francisca Sabasa y García

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6The Picnic

67Marquisa of Santa Cruz

7Dancing by the River Manzanares

68El Maragato Points a Gun at Friar Pedro

8The Parasol

69The Meadow of San Isidro (detail)

9Prince Balthasar Carlos

70Friar Pedro of Zalvidia Diverts El Maragato’s Gun

10The Crucifixion

71Struggle between Friar Pedro and Maragato

11La Novillada

72Friar Pedro Strikes El Maragato

12Mary, Queen of Martyrs

73Friar Pedro Fires on El Maragato

13St Bernardino of Siena Preaching before Alonso V of Aragon

74Friar Pedro of Zalvidia Binds Maragato Hand and Foot

14Maria Teresa de Bourbon

75The Colossus

15Portrait of the Count of Floridablanca and Goya

76The Grinder

16The Family of the Infante Don Luis

77The Water Carrier

17Countess-Duchess of Benavente

78Majas at Balcony

18The Marquesa de Pontejos

79General Nicolas Guye

19Spring (The Flowergirls)

80Caridad (Charity)

20Summer (Harvesting)

81Y non hai remedio (This is Worse)

21Autumn (The Vintage)

82Disasters of War

22Winter (The Snow Tempest)

83Lo peor es pedir (The Worst is to Beg)

23Wounded Mason

84The Forge

24Portrait of Charles III in Hunting Costume

85The Bullfight

25The Swing

86Inquisition Scene

26A Village Procession

87Use of a Pulley

27Highwaymen Attacking a Coach

88Hunter Loading His Gun

28The Meadow of San Isidro

89Hunter with His Dog, Waiting

29St Francis Borgia Exorcising

90Hunter with His Dog

30Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga

91Hunter with His Dog Bringing back a Rabbit

31Blind Man’s Buff

92Ferdinand VII

32Charles IV

93Second of May 1808

33Maria Luisa

94Third of May 1808

34Self-Portrait

95No se puede mirar (This is too painful to look at!)

35The Wedding

96Que crueldad! (What Cruelty!)

36Las Gigantillas (Little Giants)

97Divina Libertad (Divine Liberty)

37The Straw Mannequin

98Self-Portrait

38Sleeping Woman

99Portrait of Mariano Goya

39Yard with Lunatics

100Temeridad de Martincho en la plaza de Zaragoza (The bullfighter Martincho performing a daredevil feat in the Saragosse ring)

40The Marquesa of Solana

101Desgracias acaecidas en el tendido de la plaza de Madrid, y muerte del alcalde de Torrejón (Unfortunate events in the front seats of the ring Of Madrid and the death of the Mayor of Torrejon)

41Duchess of Alba

102El célebre Fernando del Toro barilarguero, Obligando à la fiera con su garrocha (The celebrated Fernando del Toro draws the fierce beast with his pike)

42Young Woman Bathing in a Fountain

103Banderillas de fuego (Banderillas of Fire)

43Andalusian Dancer and a Guitarist

104Que se rompe la cuerda! (May the Rope Break!)

44Caricatura Alegre (Merry Caricature)

105Saints Justa and Rufina

45Máscaras Crueles (Cruel Masks)

106Last Communion of St Joseph of Calasanz

46St Ambrose

107Agony in the Garden

47Portrait of Martin Zapater

108Goya Treated by Arrieta