Goya and the Mystery of Reading

By Luis Martín-Estudillo

Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) lived through an era of profound societal change. One of the transformations that he engaged passionately was the unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available. He documented and questioned this reading revolution in some of his most captivating paintings, prints, and drawings.

Goya and the Mystery of Reading explores the critical impact this transition had on the work of an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to see it anew—to read it. Goya's creations offer a sustained reflection on the implications of reading, which he depicted as an ambiguous, often mysterious activity: one which could lead to knowledge or ecstasy, to self-fulfillment or self-destruction, to piety or perdition. At the same time, he used reading to elicit new possibilities of interpretation. This book reveals for the first time the historical, intellectual, and artistic underpinnings of reading as one of the pillars of his art.

This book is the recipient of the 2023 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780826505347

Luis Martín-Estudillo

Luis Martín-Estudillo is a professor and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa. He is executive editor of the Hispanic Issues series.

Book preview

GOYA AND THE MYSTERY OF READING

Goya and the Mystery of Reading

LUIS MARTÍN-ESTUDILLO

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nashville, Tennessee

Copyright 2023 Vanderbilt University Press

All rights reserved

First printing 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Martín-Estudillo, Luis, author.

Title: Goya and the mystery of reading / Luis Martín-Estudillo.

Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022045772 (print) | LCCN 2022045773 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826505323 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826505330 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826505347 (epub) | ISBN 9780826505354 (adobe pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Goya, Francisco, 1746-1828—Criticism and interpretation. | Books and reading in art.

Classification: LCC N7113.G68 M37 2023 (print) | LCC N7113.G68 (ebook) | DDC 759.6--dc23/eng/20221021

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045772

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045773

For B. & J.—mystery readers

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction. Francisco de Goya and the Reading Revolutions

1. Reading and Politics

2. Reading and the Self

3. Reading, Leisure, and Sensuality

4. Reading and the Contours of the Human

Afterword. Words Written at the Edge of Shadows

Notes

Bibliography

Image Credits

Acknowledgments

Index

Author’s Note

A preliminary version of section two in Chapter 1 appeared as "Real presencia, soberana atención: La Junta de Filipinas de Goya" in issue 374 (January–March 2021) of the journal Goya, published by the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano. I appreciate their permission to reprint it as well as their generosity with material belonging to their remarkable collection.

To facilitate reading, I have modernized the spelling and punctuation throughout, including Goya’s captions. (His spelling was very volatile, as was the case with most writers of Spanish at the time). All translations are my own unless stated otherwise in the bibliography; the original quotes are included in the notes.

INTRODUCTION

Francisco de Goya and the Reading Revolutions

Reading fascinated the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828). Throughout his long career he never ceased observing and recreating this complex activity, which appears in a number of his most ambitious, groundbreaking works. In some, reading is depicted explicitly, as in his Los Caprichos series, whose plate 29 both satirizes those who made the activity a vacuous form of social distinction and at the same time offers an alternative. This caption, This Is Indeed Reading, implicitly—and quite obsequiously—identifies the discerning spectator as a truly sophisticated reader, unlike the ludicrous dandy feigning self-cultivation by confronting a text with his eyes shut. We also find readers in his celebrated Black Paintings (in one of them we see the Devil himself, incarnated as a billy goat, lecturing to a sinister-looking group of followers from a book) and in other experimental essays (his own word), such as the lithographs and works on ivory that he, ever the innovator, created toward the end of his life. In other images, reading is less evident at first, yet Goya makes it significant all the same. Such is the case in his distressing The Inquisition Tribunal, where the artist has us witness different reactions to the pronouncement of a sentence by the same draconian institution he himself once faced, or in the enormous canvas for the Royal Company of the Philippines—an underexamined masterwork in which Goya dismantles the genre of history painting. The theme also appears repeatedly in the most private portion of his output, his drawings, which behind their seeming simplicity present interpretative challenges that are comparable to those of his greater works.

Goya’s unusual attention to reading must be related to the unprecedented growth during his lifetime both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available. He witnessed how the intensive reading of a small number of texts by a minority of the population, which had been a constant in European culture for centuries, quickly gave way to an abundance of readings and readers, characterized at the time as a fever, epidemic, or furor. Books upon books! What madness! we read in Rousseau’s Emile. As all Europe is full of books, Europeans regard them as necessary, forgetting that they are unknown throughout three-quarters of the globe.¹ It was a genuine reading revolution.² This phenomenal change contributed greatly to animating the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Goya’s interest in this transition nourished key aspects of his art, going far beyond a simple reflection of what he saw and experienced. It had a critical impact on his work, that of an artist whose ambition was not to copy the world around him, but to interpret it—to read it.

That world in which Goya saw ever more readers engaging with ever more texts revealed itself to him as also a world that was itself legible, as were its inhabitants. It was all a large, mysterious book in which he would come to inscribe his own work. Along these lines, he found himself in agreement with some of the brightest minds of his time. Aside from participating in the furor that the deluge of print matter caused, Goya and many others were captivated by the notion that everything around them was legible, even if it wasn’t codified alphabetically: Nature is my book, wrote his friend the poet Juan Meléndez Valdés.³ They approached as texts anything from the signs of the cosmos to human figures, often following physiognomic principles that claimed to comprehend the spirits animating those bodies by reading their faces. I have read it in his body, he didn’t know he had such skill, Goya wrote in a letter, explaining why he had encouraged a colleague to try painting miniature portraits.⁴

Yet it was the wide dissemination of print matter, from books in every format to newspapers and chapbooks, and the corresponding transformation of reading habits, that produced the most intense debates on the topic in Spain and the West at large. By the middle of the eighteenth century, reading had ceased to be an almost cryptic practice, the patrimony of just a few. For the enlightened journalist José Clavijo, this expansion was a sign that those barbaric centuries, when even the ability to read was seen as something belonging to a certain class of people, were coming to an end.⁵ While some influential individuals close to the artist celebrated the expansion of reading as a fundamental step toward the emancipation of humankind (as was the case with the poet Manuel J. Quintana, author of an ode To the Invention of the Printing Press), others worried about it. It was as if suddenly all sorts of texts appeared to be everywhere, and everyone seemed to be reading something. "Even porters are buying the Gaceta," the clergyman and scholar Pedro Estala reported from Madrid in 1794; twenty years later, he had to flee the Inquisition for having translated Rousseau’s The Social Contract.⁶ Rulers, priests, and physicians were among those concerned about the public management of reading and the effects it might cause. Their apprehension was nothing new: Plato had already seen problems attendant to the diffusion of reading more than two millennia earlier. In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella approved the first measures aimed at controlling the production and trade of books in 1502. Failure to comply could bring with it the death penalty. A range of restrictions on reading remained in place for centuries. In 1767, one such measure prohibited the printing of several popular genres perceived as harmful. Another aimed to prevent the collapse of the ancien régime that certain texts arriving from cities beyond the Pyrenees, such as Geneva, seemed to be instigating.⁷ A similar prohibition was put in place to curb the immoral effects of a newly fashionable genre: on May 27, 1799, the printing of novels was outlawed.⁸ The cordon sanitaire that secular and religious authorities tried to impose around texts considered dangerous was descended from the initiatives against Protestant heresy in previous centuries. These efforts sought to prevent the dissemination of ideas that could lead to political change. They materialized in a strict, though not totalizing, control over the importation, production, sale, and reception of print matter. Readers accepted these circumstances as the unavoidable dangers surrounding anyone who wants to read, as Goya’s friend the playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín bemoaned.⁹

Even those who were decidedly in favor of the advancement and spreading of knowledge expressed reservations—both aesthetic and moral—about the publishing craze. New restrictive ideas were added to the old dogmas; for instance, that of utility, which justified the prohibition of any book that was not positively useful to the common good.¹⁰ An enlightened patron of Goya, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos—who was a writer and a censor of books himself, and yet had to confront official attempts to control his own libraries—harbored his own doubts about such widespread book production: The mania of making books has become close to a furor, and this furor engenders and aborts very many bad books every day for each one that it delivers happily. It is with good reason that people distrust new books and see them as a dangerous meal. . . . [Y]ou could even bet that, for every hundred bad ones, at least fifty of them are so not only in the literary sense, but also in the moral one.¹¹

The protection of orthodoxy focused on written texts, but it often incorporated equivalent rules meant to govern visual works. Those in charge of safeguarding moral, political, and religious order understood reading and the viewing of images as two faces of the same dangerous phenomenon. Since the creation of the first Index of banned books in 1583, the censorship of written texts had gone hand in hand with the inspection of images. Protecting religious orthodoxy was not the only goal. The authorities were also concerned by the grave scandal and no lesser damage produced by . . . lascivious images in paint, print, statue, and other sculptures.¹² In Goya’s Spain, forbidden books and dishonest paintings often appeared together as the target of the Holy Inquisition, the office of the Catholic Church in charge of protecting dogma and prosecuting bad Christians. Later on, particularly in the eighteenth century, the enactment of rules about the importation of texts would cause a great deal of friction between the Crown’s Juzgado de Imprentas (Printing Court) and the Inquisition.¹³ Even so, frequently their measures had more to do with political concerns than with matters of personal health or religious morals.

In any case, repressive vigilance could not stop the expansion of reading and access to suggestive images during Goya’s time. The public obtained information about local and foreign releases through catalogs and other forms of advertisement. If one had money to pay for them, it was not difficult to elude official controls. Distribution channels, both legal and clandestine, were well established. While new, imported books were quite a luxury, some texts, like chapbooks, were inexpensive, and most city inhabitants could afford them. Used books and books for rent were also easily available.¹⁴

The early forms of newspapers contributed to the emergence of an incipient public opinion that could potentially exert some pressure on rulers but would also be subject to the influence of the government and of ill-intentioned writers, according to pessimistic observers.¹⁵ At the end of the eighteenth century, the idea that the dramatic changes that social life was undergoing were due more to the vast number of readers than to the actions of revolutionary activists gained traction.¹⁶ Regardless of the extent to which radical political change may have actually been connected to the effects of books and manifestos, the fact is that the widespread emergence of reading was an unstoppable phenomenon that reshaped Europeans’ lives. For liberals, freedom of the press became a fundamental guarantee against tyranny, as they believed that the education and emancipation of the people depended on it.¹⁷

Undoubtedly, Goya was very aware of these developments. They were conspicuous around him, and several of his friends and acquaintances played significant roles in them. He also participated in these debates, offering contributions that are striking in their ambiguity. Particularly after he lost his hearing in 1793, reading became a preferred means through which he related to the world around him.¹⁸ Yet, however relevant this circumstance may have been, the truth is that his visual recreations of reading stand as a document (as relatively reliable as any other) of the substantial transformations that the practice was both causing and undergoing, and which required novel artistic treatments. As Janis Tomlinson aptly points out, Goya witnessed unprecedented transitions that demanded new vocabularies.¹⁹ In images large and small, quotidian and extraordinary, Goya depicted a wide variety of readers, both real and imaginary. Women and men, the young and the old, aristocrats and commoners, scholars and peasants, witches and monks, even animals: they approach myriad texts with curiosity, fear, or desire; craving enjoyment or to evade reality; searching for answers mundane and profound; or attempting to become, or pretending to be, someone else. Yet he did not limit his creative engagement with this activity to merely representing it in different ways. Goya’s work acknowledges the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his artwork, multiplying its potential for meaning.

The importance of his contribution exceeds its testimonial value, however. His works are, above all, a speculative reflection that ultimately grapples with some of the most controversial political and intellectual issues in the dawn of modernity. An understanding of these images requires putting them in dialogue with other discourses about topics such as the nature and limits of knowledge, the formation of identity, the social standing of women, and the questioning of authority. Goya engages in these debates from a position that fosters questions rather than certainties.

Mystified by the ambiguity of reading, Goya did not contribute to clarifying its mystery; rather, he made it more provocative. In some of his works, readers elevate themselves toward the light of reason, while in other scenes reading deepens further the shadows of superstition, intolerance, or lowly passions. His images emphasize the disruptive power of an activity of which he portrayed two distinct aspects: one that destroys prejudice and dispels false beliefs, that frees men and women, guiding them toward a notion of self that is not exclusively dependent on their lineage; and another that leads to suffering or madness, dissolves individuality, and feeds prejudice. Goya explored these two sides as well as the gray area in between. It is precisely in this ambivalent middle ground where we can situate his most relevant work.

In Goya’s oeuvre, reading appears as a transformative activity, but not necessarily as a means to self-improvement. The notion that reading is a beneficial practice, widely accepted today, was not established during his time. He shares his contemporaries’ ambivalence about the properties of reading. While reading is something that may free the individual in a number of different ways, it also may doom or condemn the reader, depending on who that reader may be as well as her or his disposition, aims, and circumstances, including intellectual ability; which texts are approached; in the company of whom, etc. For the artist, reading creates opportunities for the individual and for society—yet it also entails physical, sentimental, moral, and political dangers. A letter, a newspaper or a book are objects which can awaken desire, forge consciousness, or lead to perdition.

Goya’s work also deals with an aspect that is deeper and more permanent than circumstantial effects or evaluations of reading, exploring the almost unlimited opening of meaning that is inherent to the practice of textual interpretation, especially when combined with the power of images. In fact, as Anthony Cascardi remarks, some of his art operates against the common belief that language is the medium of reason and offers our best chance for making sense out of a sometimes chaotic world.²⁰ Goya’s position has contributed to the perplexity of spectators more confident in the power of the word. The hermeneutic challenge posited by a good portion of his production was perceived early on. The first known review of his series of etchings Los Caprichos (1799), published in 1811, deems that collection of eighty prints the most appropriate work for exercising the ingenuity of the youth, and a touchstone to test the penetrative force and liveliness of understanding of all kinds of people.²¹ Contrary to those who deemed that the plates only represented the rarities of their author, the reviewer contends that "sensible people for sure knew that they all contained a certain mystery."²² Although, in general, enlightened taste at its most rationalistic deplored lack of clarity—mixture, ambiguity, and allegorical excess were considered reproachable folly, belonging to barbarous times past—an appropriate dose of enigma could be seen as a stimulating exercise.²³ This notion became more widely accepted as tastes shifted toward a romantic fascination with mystery.

The fundamentally open character of reading appealed to this form of indeterminacy. In Goya’s time reading was, as it still is today, a very peculiar operation. On the one hand, it unleashes significations whose effects on an individual and her or his community are unpredictable: reading may lead to reactions such as introspection, laughter, desire, awe, terror, rebellion, or even self-harm—all of which Goya captured. On the other hand, the ambiguity of language that literature cultivates (and which is also present to different degrees in other types of texts) is a reality that is as fundamental as it is intangible, something that seemingly leaves no trace other than signs on a page, which Goya hides in most of his depictions of texts. Nor is the active component of reading—an occupation that is only apparently passive, often represented with a static character sitting before a page—visible.

However, this invisibility does not detract from reading’s power. Quite the contrary—it might make the activity all the more determinant and full of unpredictable potentialities. Perhaps that is why, while being in principle devoid of dramatic interest, it is so captivating in Goya’s eyes. The depicted text (a letter, a book, a simple piece of paper), frequently illegible for us, is a vanishing point that leads to an outside reality, the equivalent of a semantic black hole that is so densely consequential that it does not allow a single word to reveal itself to our interpretation. And yet, it points to a potentially transformative meaning that must be constructed through other means. Moreover, the presence of this type of document in Goya’s images serves as a metatextual element that has the effect of highlighting the artwork’s own status as representation.²⁴

Goya’s fascination with reading is not to be inferred only from the images he created. Most notably, he was explicit about his excitement at the thought of his beloved friend Martín Zapater reading the letters that Goya sent him periodically. I wish I could see you reading them, the artist noted longingly in one of his missives, after declaring that he had trouble controlling his quill as he was constantly distracted by a portrait he had painted of Zapater.²⁵ He probably refers to the 1790 image where his friend is shown holding a paper inscribed and signed by Goya (fig. 0.1). In several of his letters, the artist drew eyes that stare at the recipient (fig. 0.2). These documents are a touching reminder that the absorption that a reader feels when engrossed in a text has a parallel in observers of that same focused activity. They are also a testimony to what an artist may experience upon witnessing the scene of intense engagement of the intellect, the imagination, and the emotions that reading can be. As Garrett Stewart observes, while the image of someone reading, with its stasis, blankness, introversion is hardly the stuff of scenic drama, there is something about it that has made it powerfully attractive for numerous visual artists throughout the last five centuries.²⁶

FIGURE 0.1. Goya, Martín Zapater, 1790. Museo de Ponce.

Goya’s artistic engagement with reading was not limited to portraying reading scenes. Thanks to an attentive witness of his craft, we know that reading was also an intrinsic part of his creative process. In the first ever study of one of his paintings, published during the life of the artist, his friend the pioneering art historian Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez describes Goya’s approach to fulfilling a commission from the Cathedral of Seville. The assignment, which Ceán Bermúdez himself had orchestrated, was to produce a representation of Saint Justa and Saint Rufina.²⁷ Before sketching the image, Ceán Bermúdez notes, Goya reflectively read the minutes of the martyrdom of the two sisters as written by Saint Isidore.²⁸ This first step of examining obscure documentation was perhaps facilitated in this instance by Ceán Bermúdez, who was himself a bookworm. It emphasizes once again the intellectual nature of the art of painting, its standing as a liberal activity. The old need to vindicate the high social status of painters resonates in the words, even though the issue had mostly been laid to rest. By the time Goya was working on this commission, the role of artists in advancing the common good and constructing national identities had been widely recognized, as had their intellectual propensities.²⁹ But above all, it is important to highlight that the reading that Goya initially carried out with the aim of informing himself so as not to fall into anachronisms or other historical defects³⁰ had, according to Ceán Bermúdez, an additional consequence, one that was more emotional than rational. His reading had left the artist suffused with the faith, fortitude, and love of God that had characterized the two saintly sisters.³¹ This would have prepared Goya to put all of his study in inventing forms, expressions, and affects appropriate to the subject matter.³² Reading was therefore a prelude that predisposed Goya intellectually and emotionally for creation.

FIGURE 0.2. Goya, letter to Martín Zapater (detail), c. 1783. Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.

Reading can also have a direct impact on the reception of images. In his own work, and particularly in his drawings and etchings, Goya included numerous inscriptions the decoding of which affects the meaning that the images may have for the spectator, who is thus transformed into a reader. While in outmoded genres, such as emblems, or in painted works of his own time (as we shall see in Chapter 2 regarding the tile panel Valencian Family), the primary purpose of the added linguistic segment is to narrow down the possible signification of the accompanying image, offering a detailed explanation that regulates and guides its interpretation, in many of Goya’s visual-verbal combinations the result is altogether different. As Andrei Pop has observed, on many occasions the inscriptions he included do not point to the theme of the image, but rather allude to the possible reactions of their reader/spectators.³³ Whether by introducing text into the composition itself or placing it in the margins, the words that he incorporates into his works often hinder and interrupt the fluidity of the hermeneutic exercise. The additional effort that the inscriptions impose make all the more patent the constructive nature of the artistic object, in contrast to the purportedly transparent mimesis (in truth just as artificial) of neoclassical painters such as the influential Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–79), who preceded Goya as chamber painter to the king of Spain. The words that Goya inserts do not necessarily clarify or make his images more precise; rather, they often muddle them, reminding us of their dual status as, on the one hand, representations of an external reality that is ultimately incomprehensible, and, on the other, artifacts that are in themselves legible but whose meaning can likewise escape us.

The formal preferences of the Spanish artist also found an echo in the semantic indetermination that the act of reading gives rise to. Dissatisfied with the neoclassical postulates of many of his colleagues, who aimed to copy nature as closely as possible, Goya advocated for a more open creative approach. He did not aspire to literality; in certain instances, he even retreat[ed] entirely from the imitation of nature, as was noted in the newspaper announcement of his collection of prints of capricious matters, invented and engraved with aquafortis.³⁴ Instead, he favored looking at the world in a way that intensified interpretative options. Abandoning the goal of perfection (in the primary sense of completed or finished), Goya defended invention: a discovery that is the product of an imaginative quest, a search that is always rendered purposefully incomplete. His was a process whose results cannot be reduced to univocal meanings, probably because the artist was aware of the impossibility of determining the ultimate truths of the things—be they called nature or reality—that he observed, interpreted, or read. His judgments were always tentative, provisional—like those derived from a conscientious reading of substantial texts. One could say that Goya painted in a spirit akin to that of an open-minded, active reader, as his work instigates a plurality of meanings.

These are all key factors when analyzing reading scenes in Goya’s oeuvre. Some are among his most surprising images: a giant donkey peering through a window to read something that two small figures are holding for the animal; a supernatural creature sitting on the shoulders of another while they read a book, which two other startling characters hold with pliers; several men in vaguely Eastern attire hiding from an elephant behind a huge book which they seem to require the pachyderm to read. Over the course of decades of incessant work in several media, from deceptively simple drawings to many etchings, lithographs, and oil paintings; in the famous murals known as Black Paintings that he crafted to decorate the walls of his own house; and in the small works he cocreated in exile with his stepdaughter Rosario Weiss Zorrilla in the final years of his life, Goya explored many aspects of reading. He seldom approached it superficially.

Needless to say, many artists preceded Goya in creating images in which reading or books had a relevant presence. There were numerous examples in the collections to which he had access. In the majority of those works, however, those elements have an ancillary function: texts and reading appear mainly as symbolic support included to convey a different theme. The books that Goya could see portrayed in existing works were above all religious in nature—bibles, devotional companions, or insignia for holy figures. This is the case in paintings such as Robert Campin’s The Annunciation (1420–25; Museo del Prado, Madrid); El Greco’s Saint Jerome as a Scholar (c. 1610; Metropolitan Museum, New York); José de Ribera’s Saint Peter and Saint Paul (with its fascinating treatment of writing, c. 1616; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg), and Rubens’s Saint Simon and Saint Thomas (1610–12; Museo del Prado). The role given to volumes is particularly important in portraits of scholarly men, such as those that El Greco painted of Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Francisco de Pisa (c. 1610–14; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth), Murillo’s Justino de Neve (1665; National Gallery,