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Goyas Language
Edward F. Stanton

n late 1792, when Goya was forty-six years old, something happened that would change him forever. His climb to professional success was interrupted by an illness that almost killed him. We do not know exactly what afflicted him, but it has been variously attributed to inflammation of the inner ear, Mnires syndrome (or auditory vertigo), botulism, polio, hepatitis, and syphilis. Whatever it was, the malady left him deaf for life. As Robert Hughes says, Goyas deafness is one of the insoluble mysteries of arts medical history, ranking with Vincent van Goghs madness and depression (127). At any rate, this terrible illness did not deter the Spaniard; if anything, the isolation brought by deafness seems to have enhanced his powers immeasurably. As painter to the court of the Bourbon monarchs, Goya continued painting official portraits of kings, queens, nobles, and statesmen in order to make a living. But now he spent more time drawing and experimenting with new media like etching and aquatint. By the late 1790s he was executing Los Caprichos, a set of engravings that revealed a vision very different from his official worksometimes comic, more often satirical, tragic, or grotesque. These prints were followed by Los Desastres de la guerra, Goyas record of the Peninsular wars between 1808 and 1812; La Tauromaquia, an elaborate treatment of the bullfight; and Los Disparates, an enigmatic series of etchings and aquatints that seems to defy interpretation. In a certain sense Goyas turn to graphic work began while he was recovering from his illness in the Andalusian house of his friend and benefactor Sebastin Martnez in 179394. There he had the opportunity to study this gentlemans enormous collection of prints by European artists, especially from England. Goya realized the possibilities of the new medium. He had made some engravings before going deaf, but most were small copies after Velzquezs paintings in the royal collections in Madrid, which are of slight interest today (Hughes 177).1 Most of the etchings that Goya studied in Martnezs collection were satires and caricatures with wordy, instructive captions. This kind of work had also become popular in Spain. Several years before the publication of Goyas Caprichos, for example, a pamphlet appeared that was an inventory of Spanish clothCopyright 2007 Heldref Publications
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ing. One picture in this publication shows a sereno or night watchman and reads, El trage de Sereno, en una estampa en quartilla de marca mayor, en la que se demuestra explicado todo lo que debe llebar un Sereno para Zelar el trmino que le corresponda; tambin se be un Currutaco que le acompaa.2 Another pamphlet, published around the same time, may have been known to Goya. It contained caricatures of donkeys dressed like humans of various professions. Its author described the Asinus Medicus in a quintilla or five-syllable stanza:
Es tu enfermedad fatal, Dice este Doctor, advierte, El principio de tu mal Es, que eres un animal En la vida, y en la muerte. . .3

In his Caprichos, Goya created a set of six prints that use donkeys to satirize human foibles; these etchings are sometimes referred to as his asneras. The title of one of these engravings poses a simple question: De que mal morir? (see figure 1).4 The answer, of course, is that the patient will not die because of an illness, but because his doctor is a quack. In contrast to the wordy doggerel of the poem above, the caption is forceful and concise. Goyas titles are very different from those that were popular at the time. He does not attempt to be descriptive or moralistic. Rather than appropriating and exhausting analysis through lengthy captions, he gives us rubrics that are brief and open-ended. The wide range of interpretations among his contemporaries demonstrates that they struggled with the meanings of his works as much as we do. One of the Caprichos, for example, with the simple title Duendecitos (figure 2), was interpreted literally by the author of the so-called Prado manuscript, who enumerated the characteristics of these little creatures: they are jolly, playful, obliging, a little greedy and fond of practical jokes, but in general good-natured. On the other hand, the author of the contemporary Lpez de Ayala manuscript read the engraving as satire and allegory, construing the dwarfish figures as priests and monkslos verdaderos duendecitos de este mundo; they were agents of the Church with its mano larga y diente canino. . .5 Both interpretationsas well as othersmay be valid, but neither captures all the elements in Goyas print: the individuality of the three goblins, their varied body language, the unknown content of their cups and bowls, the odd window in the background, the play of light and shadows, the delightful humor. In his new book on Los Caprichos, Andrew Schulz observes that the semantic indeterminacy of these prints accounts for the continuous fascination of two centuries of viewers (19293). The same holds true for most of Goyas later graphic work from Los Desastres de la guerra through Los Disparates. An examination of other prints will show how the artist used compression and ambiguity in his titles. One Capricho shows a monk brandishing an enormous syringe that will flush out the intestines of an unfortunate dissenter (figure 3). Its
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Figure 1. De que mal morira?, Los Caprichos, plate 40. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.

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Figure 2. Duendecitos, Los Caprichos, plate 49. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.

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Figure 3. Tragala perro, Los Caprichos, plate 58. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.

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captionTragala perroderives from a popular eighteenth-century song of Spanish liberals who insulted the absolutists of the Bourbon dynasty:
[. . .] Y mientras dure esta canalla no cesaremos de decir Trgala!. . . Trgala, trgala, trgala, perro!6

Here the artist followed his usual method of reduction and inversion as he omitted the repetition of the refrain and put the antimonarchical command in the torturers gaping mouths. Another etching from Los Caprichos quotes two lines from a satire written by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos; they refer to the nubile women who were married off to men of means: El si pronuncian y la mano alargan / Al primero que llega (figure 4).7 Although the titles borrowed verses are impeccable and articulate a justifiable criticism of marriage customs, they lack the power and concision of the headings that Goya created out of whole cloth. The modern poet Rafael Alberti proved the lyrical potential of the artists captions by stringing six of them together in the verses of a poem titled Goya:
Duendecitos. Soplones. Despacha, que despiertan . . . Ya es hora. Gaudeamus! Buen viaje. (A la pintura 34749)

Each of these poetic sentences refers to one of the artists prints from Los Caprichos.8 The lines can be parsed as perfectly as those of Jovellanos, but they are pithier and more incisive. In his autobiography, Alberti referred to the masters minimal titles and the impact they had on his own development as a painter (La arboleda 120). Another Spanish poet, Federico Garca Lorca, rendered homage to Goya in his lecture Teora y juego del duende (Prosa). His poetry may resonate with echoes of the artists work. In another one of Los Caprichos, titled Que se la llevaron!, two men kidnap a young woman in the night (figure 5). Goya uses the colloquial que both for emphasis (as in Spanish expressions like Que s, que s!) and to indicate that the action takes place in medias res: something has occurred earlier that leads up to the abduction. In the most famous poem in the Spanish language, Lorcas Romance de la casada infiel, the poet employs the word in a similar way, prefixing it with the second conjunction y to make the language still more emphatic and to throw the reader even more directly into the events: Y que me la llev al ro / creyendo que era mozuela. . . (Primer romancero gitano 134). Brevity is the most obvious mark of Goyas language and what sets him apart from other printmakers of the period. If we compare the provisional titles for his preparatory drawings with the captions for their corresponding prints, we will see that the artist tended to slash his own words unsparingly. The rubric of his sketch for Capricho 14, for example, which portrays a young woman surrounded by
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Figure 4. El si pronuncian y la mano alargan / Al primero que llega, Los Caprichos, plate 2. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University. grotesque suitors, reads Sacrificio del Ynteres. . . son Seoritos a cual mas rico; y la pobre / no sabe a qual escoger. In the final print based on this drawing, Goya reduced the title to the terse Que sacrificio! (figure 6). The words seem charged with emotion, revealing compassion for the victim of this arranged marriage; at the same time, they sound understated, suggesting a distance between image and text. The sketch for Capricho 69, which represents a gang of witches and pedophiles, is called Sueo de Brujas/consumadas; in the final print, the artist condenses the working title to a single word, Sopla (figure 7). This succinct caption focuses the viewers attenWINTER 2007, VOL. 54, NO. 1 85

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Figure 5. Que se la llevaron!, Los Caprichos, plate 8. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University. tion on the anus of the abused child in the center of the etching. It shows the same disturbing ambiguity as Que sacrificio! How are we supposed to react to these works that depict such abominable vicesthe exploitation of a young woman and a childto which the artist responds with such laconic words? On occasion, Goyas self-editing sacrifices shades of meaning to verbal economy. A case in point is the original epigraph of the sketch for his Capricho 13, Sueo / De unos hombres que se nos comian. The words refer to a group of monks who are stuffing themselves with food. The longer title of the preliminary drawing ended up in the final print as Estan calientes, a heading that is tighter and

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more suggestive but that lacks the critical, social reach of the first: these men and other religious are eating the country out of house and home (figure 8). In most instances the artist transformed the detached and objective descriptions of his sketches into the more urgent and subjective comments of his engravings. No less than eleven of Los Caprichos have exclamations as their titles, which of course reveal the speakersGoyasemotion, often ironic: Que sacrificio!; Que pico de Oro!, he describes a parrot in another print; Brabisimo!, he applauds a monkey who is playing a guitar. About half as many of the engravings in this series pose questions, usually sarcastic: De que mal morira?; Si sabr mas el discipulo?, Goya inquires of a donkey who is teaching another ass in a schoolroom; Porque esconderlos?, he asks a moribund clergyman who attempts to hide his money bags. The artist even places one of his captions in the first person, creating a private voice that shocks us because it is so unexpected, so different from the public tone of titles by other artists at the time. In one of his Desastres de la guerra, Goya tells us Yo lo vi, proclaiming that he has been an eye witness to the flight of the etchings mother with her little child and the priest with the stolen treasure from his parish (figure 9). In another print from the same series, a hooded figure walks by a row of corpses in the dark, probably after looting them (figure 10). The caption may be the most beautiful and haunting in all of Goyas work: Las camas de la muerte. Here the artists language achieves the metaphorical dimension of lyric poetry. Schulz observes that Goyas titles contain no proper names, rarely exceed three or four words in length, and often focus attention on the image by directing the viewer to make visual comparisons or examinations (191). In his captions, preaching and didacticism become miniature works of artbrief, almost private, fragmentary. One year after the publication of Los Caprichos, Friedrich Schlegel would argue in his book Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms that a fragment could be considered aesthetically complete. More than a century later, Walter Benjamin would say that it is the sign of a dawning modernity. Goya has appropriately been called the last Old Master and the first Modernist (Hughes 10). Without the graphic work that he executed after his illness, the Spanish artist would seem much less modern. In many ways, his engravings foreshadow political cartoons of the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Goya would go on to create whole series of prints that combine visual and verbal language: Los Caprichos would contain eighty plates; Los Desastres de la guerra, eighty-three, La Tauromaquia, forty-seven;9 Los Disparates, twenty-two. Of course the artists deafness alone cannot explain his turn from other media to etching, with its use of words to support the images. We should not seek causeand-effect relationships between Goyas life and his work, keeping in mind that writers, painters, and musicians are influenced by works of other artists as well as by their own experience, that forms and genres may develop independently of historical and cultural forces. I am simply using Goyas deafness as a metaphor to help us understand the changes that occurred in his art. They are clear for anyone to seeand hear. It does not make much difference whether it was an illness,
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Figure 6. Que sacrificio!, Los Caprichos, plate 8. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University. the death of many children, depression, or any of the other possible causes that have been adduced by art historians to explain the shift in Goyas work. What matters is that his art changed dramatically in the years following his convalescence and that language became an inseparable part of his aesthetic. On 6 February 1799, Goya published a notice in the Diario de Madrid announcing the sale of his Caprichos, which could be purchased by the public in the perfume and liquor store below his apartment at number 1, Calle del Desengao.10 Unlike his official portraits, his etchings did not belong to the court or a client, but to the artist himself; they were his own to dispose of as he wished. The paintings had to bear the title ordered by the court or the patron, and this is the way they have come down to us, as King Charles III, King Charles IV, King Fer88 ROMANCE QUARTERLY

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Figure 7. Sopla, Los Caprichos, plate 69. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University. dinand VII, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Sebastin Martnez, the Duke of Alba, the Duchess of Alba, and so forth. In contrast, Goya could freely invent captions for his drawings, etchings, and aquatints, because they were his. This was the artistic freedom of which he had dreamt for at least twenty years. In letters to his friend Martn Zapater, he said es muy odioso el ynventar para otros and that someday he hoped to stop being an artist of commissioned works to devote himself wholly to cosas de mi gusto.11 In the aftermath of Goyas malady and deafness, language became an integral part of his work. As long as he had enjoyed the gift of hearing, his voice had been silent in his works. Then, at the same time as he lost the capacity to hear other peoples words, he began to speak or write captions for his engravings. As we have seen,
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Figure 8. Estan calientes, Los Caprichos, plate 13. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University. his words are precise, succinct, and pointed. In contrast to the public titles of his paintings, the captions for his prints are intimate and ironic, messages that speed across time and sting like darts. In fact they probably strike us more sharply than they did his contemporaries, to whom they must have seemed strange and remote. Goyas titles enrich and deepen the engravings. His language resonates with or against the images. Words enhance vision. We can hear those words. University of Kentucky
NOTES 1. One exception was the remarkable El agarrotado (ca. 1770).
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Figure 9. Yo lo vi, Los Desastres de la guerra, plate 44. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.

Figure 10. Las camas de la muerte, Los Desastres de la guerra, plate 62. Reproduced by permission of Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.
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2. The pamphlet (1791) is cited in Helman 41. 3. The pamphlet is titled Memorias de la insigne Academia Asnal (1792); its author was a certain Doctor de Ballesteros (Helman 72). 4. I use Goyas spellings for the titles of all his works. 5. For the complete texts of the Lpez de Ayala, Prado, and Biblioteca Nacional manuscripts of Los Caprichos, see Helman 21329. 6. This song would be sung with many variants by Spanish liberals well into the twentieth century, notably during the Spanish Civil War (193639). See Daz Viana. 7. Jovellanoss poem is titled A Arnesto (1786), first published in El Censor. 8. The six phrases correspond respectively to Caprichos 49, 48, 78, 80, 79 and 64. In the case of 79 (Nadie nos ha visto), Alberti is alluding to the commentary in the Ayala manuscript rather than to the etchings title; the text for this print states, Los abates y frailes echan gaudeamus a solas, y luego nos aparentan arregladas costumbres. 9. The Tauromaquia series that Goya published during his lifetime (1816) contains thirty-three prints. Twelve others survive that were not included in the original edition (Blas Benito 12). 10. The full text of the announcement appears in Gassier and Wilson 384. 11. Letters of 22 January 1777 and 2 July 1788 (Goya 53, 278). For more on the artists notion of invencin, see Tomlinson. WORKS CITED Alberti, Rafael. La arboleda perdida, I. Primero y segundo libros (19021931). Madrid: Alianza, 2002. . A la pintura. Obras completas. Vol. 2. Poesa 19391963. Madrid: Aguilar, 1988. Blas Benito, Javier. La Tauromaquia de Goya. Prologue. El libro de la Tauromaquia: Francisco de Goya. By Jos Manuel Matilla and Jos Miguel Medrano. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2001. 1113. Daz Viana, Luis. Canciones populares de la guerra civil. Madrid: Taurus, 1985. Garca Lorca, Federico. La casada infiel. Primer romancero gitano. Llanto por Ignacio Snchez Mejas. Romance de la corrida de toros de Ronda y otros textos taurinos. Ed. Miguel Garca-Posada. Madrid: Castalia, 1988. 13437. . Teora y juego del duende. Prosa. Madrid: Alianza, 1972. 16989. Gassier, Pierre, and Juliet Wilson. The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya. New York: Morrow, 1971. Goya, Francisco de. Cartas a Martn Zapater. Ed. Mercedes gueda and Javier de Salas. Madrid: Istmo, 2003. Helman, Edith. Trasmundo de Goya. 1963. Madrid: Alianza, 1983. Hughes, Robert. Goya. New York: Knopf, 2003. Schlegel, Friedrich. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1968. Schulz, Andrew. Goyas Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. Tomlinson, Janis A. Francisco Goya: The Tapestry Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of Madrid. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989.

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