Interpreting Goya’s black paintings through mythological references
Robin Samuel
Francisco Goya was a Spanish artist who lived from 1746 to 1828. Goya’s art was impacted greatly by the times in which he lived. 1 During his life, he saw immense suffering in connection with the Peninsular War, a brutal and irregular conflict that spawned the term guerrilla warfare (Spanish for ‘little war’). He witnessed more suffering at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition due to their religious persecution, resulting in a steadily darker tone to all his works. Late in his life for four years, he would live in a country house known as the ‘Quinta del Sordo’, or ‘House of the Deaf Man’. Although named for its previous owner, by the time Goya moved there he had suffered a severe illness and was also completely deaf. Lacking one of his basic senses, and almost entirely isolated, Goya painted 14 paintings directly onto the walls of his house with very few people’s knowledge. They would later come to be known as the ‘Pinturas Negras’, or ‘Black Paintings’. As Goya never intended these images to be seen publicly, he did not name them, so any titles of the works from within the Quinta del Sordo have been given posthumously. The paintings themselves are often sensationalized as being the work of a madman, driven insane due to isolation, but instead they are deliberate and intelligent, informed by a lifetime of suffering and study. The paintings contain references to different mythologies, Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman. This essay aims to demonstrate that it is in the intersection of these two mythologies that one starts to gain a better insight into how Goya had come to see the world by the end of his life. His imagery does not focus exclusively on one ideology but rather takes aspects of each, the viewer to witness the descent of someone losing faith in the people around him, and powers above him.
The fates, and a Greco-Roman view of the divine contrasted with a Christian one.
Greco-Roman myth often deals with the difference between men and gods, suggesting there are some unavoidable realities for mortals, and even for heroes . Goya’s so -named ‘ Atropos ’ or ‘ The Fates ’ painting depicts the three Fates from Greek myth. The first of his figures holds a grotesque homunculus, representing the Fate who starts a person’s existence as a thread in life’s tapestry. The second Fate measures out the thread and the third, Atropos, cuts it, ending that life. In front of these three Fates Goya has depicted a man with his hands bound by their thread which can be seen as an expressio n of Goya’s sense that both he and the rest of humanity are at the mercy of fate and the powers above them. It can be interpreted that Goya chose the subject matter of the Greek Fates because Greek mythology often criticizes its gods. Homer, the greatest poet of Ancient Greece, famously made his men, or heroes, into gods but also his gods into men. In Homeric storytelling the entirety of humanity is at the mercy of these petty squabbling beings. In the Iliad Hector is a key example of this. An honourable man often seen as far better than Achilles, but Hector is nevertheless killed by him simply because it is fated.
1 Vega 1994: 3.
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