Robert Hughes on Goya: Crazy Like a Genius

This programme contains scenes of a sexual nature and some violence.

Since I began writing art criticism over 40 years ago, I've seen thousands of images,

but I've always been fascinated by one particular artist, a Spaniard, Francisco Goya.

This man was one of the most radical artists that ever lived.

For years, I've been trying and failing to write a book about him.

In a weird way I didn't expect - for how could I? - he took me over.

About three years ago, I was nearly killed in a car wreck.

Six weeks in coma, months in hospital -

no white light, no smiling Jesus.

Only darkness and hallucination and the creatures of Goya's imagination,

mocking and chattering.

The whores and duchesses and witches and corrupt priests, all laughing at me,

certain that this wrecked Ingles, imprisoned by the ruin of his body,

could never reach into their world - Goya's world.

But in some way, nearly dying brought me nearer to it.

So I hope his people were wrong.

I think of this film as a journey into a country I've never explored enough, which always fascinated me.

The name of that country is Goya. He's a country because he includes so much. He has such enormous range.

There's such a huge diversity of feeling and sensation and type and character in him.

For a long time now, he's haunted my dreams and I've wanted to understand him.

To me, he's one of the defining figures of the 19th century, because he looks forward into the 20th

and tells us what we have in common with our ancestors.

Other artists do this - Beethoven was one, Dickens another,

but in the visual arts, in that department, Goya reigns supreme.

Here he is in 1792, at the age of 46, painting himself in Madrid.

He wears a bullfighter's jacket. It's a declaration.

Goya identified the risks of art with those of the corrida.

It was a declaration of toughness too, like a painter in the '60s wearing a black leather jacket -

"I'm hard, with it, a man of the people."

Who were Goya's people?

Well, practically everyone in Madrid on the bridge between the 18th and 19th centuries

and practically everyone today too.

Goya's themes, his subjects, are ours, as fresh and modern as if he were working in our own time.

He wasn't afraid to look on the world as a dark place where terrible things happen - he knew it WAS.

The images from his imagination seemed shocking in HIS time,

but even today, to look at many of them is to recoil from their brutality and directness.

Some much younger artists have tried to bring him up-to-date,

but all they can do is parody him.

This is a work by two of the supposed bad boys of recent British art,

Jake and Dinos Chapman.

It's a direct take from Plate 39 of Goya's Disasters Of War - Big Risk With Dead Men.

Compared to the original, with colour added, it's Barbie Doll Madame Tussaud's.

But Goya has always had a very real resonance for modern art.

He lies behind Dali's extraordinary premonition of the Civil War,

and this, not Picasso's Guernica,

is to me the greatest painting inspired by that disaster.

'He's like a household god, a keeper of conscience, to many artists, like American painter Leon Golub.'

This guy was born on the wrong side of the world somehow. OK?

He was clever enough, smart enough, skilful enough, tough enough

to play the world's game.

So he could do the kind of things that were necessary to prove himself.

-There's something else in him.

-What is it?

It's wildness. His wildness shows in his paintings.

He's a rum character, you know. He's all over the place.

-You can't grab him.

-No, cos he bites. He's a dog.

-That's right. That's right, he bites.

It's just that difficulty in pinning Goya down that keeps him alive and always fresh.

Court painter, satirist, war reporter with a taste for brutality and refinement in equal measure.

He feeds off popular culture, but isn't simply a man of the people.

He's both reporter and moralist.

He's weird. He's unpredictable.

Two paintings of the same subject sum up the huge changes that took place in Goya over his long career.

They could be by different artists, light and dark.

Here, he was painting a big religious feast day, that of San Isidro.

On that day, thousands of citizens in their Sunday best

converged on a pilgrimage chapel outside Madrid and had a picnic.

It's almost an Impressionist scene - girls with parasols, men in finery,

the sense of social pleasure and jollity,

and you feel how much Goya wants to belong to this Madrid.

30 years later, he returned to the same theme with very, very different results.

This picture here is called La Romeria a San Isidro,

The Pilgrimage To San Isidro.

Instead of those happy, fashionable, well-dressed young people,

you have this...horrible snake

of beggars and gypsies and dark figures

rolling towards the camera, like demons crawling across an ash-heap.

The landscape is dark and miserable.

The faces of the people in front, as this crowd rises up to meet you,

they're the faces of madmen and hysterics.

They've a terrible darkness to them.

The whole picture is deeply threatening, deeply irrational, profoundly weird.

You wouldn't want to be in the open with those characters - they might eat you.

Now, that's the difference between the Goya who painted the Pradera,

with all those young Madrilenas he wanted to know and maybe even wanted to make love to,

and the Madrid that Goya saw

through the filter of his old age and his intense pessimism.

Very few artists have ever changed as dramatically as Goya did.

This is part of the enigma of his career that fascinates me, that I want to find out about.

We can start the journey by beginning at his beginnings,

in the village where he was born.

Goya wasn't a peasant. Nothing like it.

He was born in a humble place because his father was working there and his mother was heavily pregnant.

They were in Fuendetodos, a tiny place outside Zaragoza,

where his mother had a cottage, but didn't live.

A poor, stony village, like thousands of others in Spain,

but now an obligatory stop on the Goya pilgrimage trail.

TRANSLATION FROM SPANISH:

I've never been here before and it doesn't tell me much. A cottage with furniture his family never owned.

And nice to know that the great man came from somewhere, that he drank water, ate stew

and probably had a cat.

Nice, harmless heritage stuff. The fact is that you don't learn from places where artists were born.

And Fuendetodos is no exception.

Except that the bare, harsh landscapes around the village

do become part of the signature of Goya's later work.

What really counted in Goya's upbringing was the city of Zaragoza,

the capital of Aragon, where his father worked as a gilder,

and where he made his first contact with professional artists, the Bayeu brothers, who taught him,

and their sister, Josefa, whom he later married.

In the 1770s,

he landed a big commission to paint a cycle of murals for a Carthusian monastery, 20km out of town.

Now, this is interesting stuff.

The Carthusians are what's known as a closed, contemplative order of monks.

They observe silence. Visitors are only rarely allowed in their Charterhouse, called the Aula Dei,

and women are never, ever granted access,

hence very few people have seen the young work of Goya here and it's never photographed.

What was the commission?

11 huge paintings telling the story of the life of the Virgin Mary.

But once inside the chapel, you see at once that most are not by Goya, or only partly so.

What happened? Leakage and seepage.

The inexperienced Goya painted right on the plaster walls with oil paint,

then the rising damp cracked the paint, blackened it, ruined it,

and turned Goya's biggest project into a fiasco.

So the Carthusians, who only cared about the religious story,

hired a couple of French artists to completely redo the Goyas.

It's a weird effect - Goya repainted by genteel French Pre-Raphaelites.

Yet they've got a power and presence that is still recognisably Goya's.

The only surviving mural here that is entirely Goya is the scene of the betrothal of the Virgin,

which even through its damage, still conveys some sense of the big-scale effects Goya strove for

in that large, broad, planar drapery.

To me, it's fascinating to see how early Goya became Goya.

Here he is, very young, a kid, and you can begin to see the lineaments of the mature Goya coming out -

certain figures and themes he brings in for the first time.

That tremendous sense of being able

to create drama without overdoing it that he had.

The looming backgrounds, shadows, silhouettes, the alteration of the eye-line -

all that is already present.

It's like hearing the opening notes of a symphony.

And, as he often would in years to come, as earlier painters he admired in the past had, like Tiepolo,

Goya painted himself right into some of the murals.

I wish we'd had more time at the Aula Dei to study them,

but film crews gum up the work of religious meditation,

and much as I'd like more time for contemplation, I'm not so sure about chastity and silence.

Goya finished the murals in 1774

and he went to Madrid to join Ramon Bayeu and his brother Francisco,

who in 1777 was made director of the Royal Tapestry Works.

And now, a stream of commissions for tapestry designs started coming Goya's way.

Thanks to his in-laws, the 29-year-old was on his way at last.

And from then on, Madrid would always be the key city for Goya.

He lived there, he painted its life, he served its kings for 40 years,

he made portraits of nearly everyone in it, from ministers to beggars.

And by far the majority of his best works of art have stayed there.

130 paintings in one museum alone, the Prado.

Hanging a room with tapestries was one of the best ways to decorate it.

A whole factory, still going today, the Royal Tapestry Works of Santa Barbara,

had been set up by Charles III to produce them.

Unlike murals, tapestries could be changed. But they had to be woven from designs,

and making those designs was Goya's job.

In time, he'd find this work a bore.

And the tastes of the clientele restricted the range.

He was expected to make idylls -

happy scenes of modern city and country life, generally as led by the lower classes,

on which the knobs and nobles could gaze with amused condescension.

After the weaving was done, Goya's designs were rolled up and stored.

Luckily, this preserved them,

so the paintings, more interesting and beautiful than their woven replicas, hang in the Prado today.

What was he learning from all this cartoon work?

How to handle detail, action, expression, pose.

It all fed into his later narrative paintings and his portraits as well.

And he was learning, most important, about how to please a client,

an act without which no painter, in an art world based on patronage,

had the ghost of a chance of success.

You have to prove yourself at a certain level in some of these societies. OK?

Then you start introducing - not even deliberately, but because this is who you are -

the face with the sort of expression which is a bit more diabolical.

And there you are coming out.

The tapestry designs aren't all amusement and light.

You see signs of the darker Goya beginning to show through - the blind guitarist, for instance.

It's the kind of subject that would have been familiar to admirers of Goya's great forerunner, Velazquez.

Painters were always doing dwarfs and cripples.

But there's something not just pathetic, but strong and imposing, about Goya's old blind man.

Like many of Goya's later phantoms,

this bony person won't just go away when you toss him a coin,

as that gentleman tourist in the yellow coat, fishing for his purse, is about to do.

GUITAR STRUMS

The big year of promise for Goya was 1788.

Charles III died, and his son, Charles IV, succeeded him.

He and his queen, Maria Louisa of Parma, would reign for nearly two decades.

Carlos made Goya his chief court painter.

The accolade brought him to the peak of material and financial success.

Goya would later be stricken down with a terrible illness.

Spain would be plunged into a nightmare of confusion and war.

But how secure this enormous palace in Madrid, with its 1,200 rooms, must have seemed then.

And how impregnable the grandeur of its monarchs, whom Goya repeatedly painted.

Carlos, the bumbling squire, who liked nothing better than hunting,

and had no mind for political intrigue -

Goya painted him in his shooting gear

with his retriever, which, notice, has traces

of the letters "G-O-Y-A" on its collar.

Maria Luisa, the impetuous Italian princess,

no genius, but certainly the most maligned woman in Spain.

The story took root, and spread, that Goya's portraits of this couple were cartoons.

Ever since the French writer, Theophile Gautier,

called this portrait of Carlos and his family, "A picture of the corner grocer who's just won the lottery,"

people have had the idea that, in some way, Goya was satirising his subjects. It's complete nonsense.

You did not keep a job or make money as an official court portraitist

if you were satirising the people you were painting. In fact, each of the figures here

was the subject of several preliminary studies, which the sitter would then see before.

No, no, this is NOT a send-up. This is actually, if anything, an act of flattery.

For instance, on the left, in the blue suit,

is one of the most odious little toads in the history of Spanish politics -

the future King Ferdinand VII, the then Prince of Asturias -

who Goya actually manages to make quite regal.

God knows how he did it, but he DID.

This is very much an act of homage. It is very much an act of respect,

almost verging upon an act of flattery.

Night falls in Madrid and, at the Prado, a new Goya show opens, called Goya And His Women.

A vast subject and, partly because its patron is the Queen of Spain,

the hottest cultural ticket in town.

Here, you can see the enormous range

of Goya's depiction of the opposite sex...

from ravishing beauties to wrinkled crones,

duchesses, milkmaids and majas.

But, as you go through it, you realise that he missed nothing,

not a detail of costume, or make-up, or hairdo, not a jewel or a gesture.

He was one of the greatest topographers of femaleness that Europe has ever known,

and by far the greatest that Spain has produced.

Yet in this immense hareem of the eye,

one player is missing.

She is in another palace, at the far end of its stately rooms,

which she hasn't left in 50 years.

Goya's relationship to her, and hers to him,

has created more scandal-mongering and sexual gossip than almost any liaison in art history.

Maria del Pilar Teresa Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo, the 13th Duchess of Alba,

was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an intellectual, like some of her friends in Madrid.

But she was a wonderful dancer, she was extremely beautiful, and a visiting Frenchman remarked,

in a book he wrote on his travels in Spain, "There was not a hair on her head that failed to excite desire."

And she was a fairly hairy girl!

Goya painted and drew the Duchess over the years, sometimes in very intimate settings,

doing her hair, doing her make-up.

The myth has endured for a very long time that Goya and the Duchess had a wild affair.

Alas, there is no evidence for it.

It seems like the purest speculation and fantasy.

But, although some women loved to have a fling with genius,

why would so famous a beauty get involved with a man more than twice her age?

I say, put it down to friendship.

But the point is that Goya may not have thought that way.

He must have felt her sexuality with the uncensorable instinct of a hound getting a scent.

I think he desired her with the passionate but rather deluded possessiveness that men of his age,

and MINE, can feel for much younger women.

So he did a portrait of her that he kept, that never left his house, that she may never even have seen.

On her finger are two rings, with her name and his.

And she is pointing to two words written in the sand at her feet...

"Solo Goya" - "Only Goya".

But it's HIS fantasy, not hers.

That's the sad thing.

Oh...!

Whoa...!

I just wish there was a little bit more pink on the right nipple.

It's hardly a surprise

that a great deal of fantasy surrounds this picture -

The Naked Maja - one of the most famous nudes in the world.

But Spain had almost no tradition of the nude, and Goya was, to a degree, breaking the mould

when he made this gorgeous girl.

However, it's got absolutely nothing to do with the Duchess of Alba.

Everybody thinks it does but, actually,

in the year Goya painted her, the Duchess of Alba was 40 years old

and beginning to die of the breakbone fever which eventually took her life away.

This is not a portrait of a 40-year-old woman suffering from dengue fever and tuberculosis.

Probably, it is a picture of the mistress of the Prime Minister,

whose name was Godoy,

and who was madly enraptured with this Malagan cutie called Pepita Tudo.

This, I am sure, is actually Pepita.

I've often thought what my feelings about the subject are.

They are, naturally, of admiration for the formal qualities of the painting,

but, in reality, they are unmodulated lust.

What I would really like to do - and, alas, neither time nor the Prado guards would permit it -

is to hop in there like a bee in a peony and have a wonderful afternoon.

At first, Goya was very happy in Madrid.

He had lots of work, and for top people. Rolling in cash,

he boasted to his boyhood friend from Zaragoza, Martin Zapater,

he's making 15,000 reales a year as court painter,

he's got a beautiful, brand-new English carriage that will turn on a dime, he's the envy of the town.

And then, it all went horribly wrong.

Late in 1792, he was staying with a friend in Andalucia, named Sebastian Martinez,

and he had a sudden attack of illness.

TRANCE-LIKE MUSIC

Vertigo, nausea, blindness,

noises in the head, deafness.

In time, some of the symptoms abated, but the deafness, no.

SILENCE

For the rest of his life, Goya was stone-deaf.

It was a catastrophe.

"I can stand on my own feet," he wrote to Zapater,

"but I don't know if my head is on my shoulders.

"I have no appetite or desire to do anything at all. I don't know what will become of me."

What did deafness mean for Goya? Well, it wasn't a simple answer. On the one hand, it imprisoned him.

It put him right in the dungeon of the self from which he could not communicate with people outside.

No more conversation, no more jokes. On the other hand, it liberated something in him.

It turned him away from being the court portraitist that he otherwise might have remained,

into...this amazing topographer... of the inner self,

of everything that had to do with hallucination and madness, craziness and fear.

Some of the work Goya did just after he went deaf

hangs in the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid,

and to go there is like walking into a microwave, it's so intense.

If there's one point where the modern temper in art is born,

it's surely these Goyas of the 1790s whose violence and irrationality

seems to match the catastrophic social upheavals of the time.

The work was small - "cabinet pictures", he called it.

It was private, but almost all about disasters and bad places.

The idyllic world of the cartoons might never have existed.

Instead, you have religious craziness, orgiastic ceremonies,

dark pageants based on folklore,

like this vision of sinister masks and banners -

The Burial Of The Sardine.

If there's anything Goya did, it was facing his own demons.

If an artist faces them, it's gonna come through.

I think that there were things moving through him,

forces moving through him, that were almost ripping him apart.

Through his art, he controlled them.

He made it work! If he hadn't had his art, he'd have ended up in an asylum.

Prisons, madhouses...

These, too, were the shapes of his own fears.

Madhouses in the 18th century weren't reformatories.

The offered no treatment, no cure - they were just dumps,

holes in the social surface, charters for degradation.

Goya knew this well. In the 1760s, his aunt and uncle had been shut up in the asylum at Zaragoza.

Maybe he feared madness was in his blood.

He painted one madhouse scene which is deliberately a satire on the world of power and order -

the world upside down, madmen dressed as kings,

gestures of power and chivalry with no meaning,

inverted sex, in the form of one man fellating another in the corner.

But for Goya, the most powerful of all images of an inverted world

was witchcraft.

Who believes in the power of witches today? Practically no-one.

Who did in Spain in the late 18th century?

Practically everyone.

Did Goya believe in them?

Well, yes and no. Nominally, he was a sceptic,

but his deepest feelings were always engaged by the old, black Spain -

not of Frenchified Madrid,

but of deep Aragon.

This one, Witches In The Air,

is, for me, the best of all his witch pictures.

A traveller on a lonely road

is swept up into the sky by three male witches.

Their bodies are compact and muscular. They defy gravity.

They're gobbling like owls at the flesh of their prey.

It's horrible and totally real,

almost mundane...

which is part of Goya's point - just part of the world.

It was believed that witches stole the lives of babies

as a sacrifice to bigger witches or to the Devil himself.

Today, this makes no sense, but it made more sense

in a time of huge infant mortality like Goya's time.

Goya's own wife may have been pregnant 20 times,

but only one son made it through to adulthood.

It was very easy to believe that evil beings were stealing your children.

Even if you DIDN'T believe in that,

you could still get an enjoyable thrill out of the witch cult,

the way you and I might enjoy a Dracula movie,

though we don't believe in vampires.

This is probably why pictures of witchcraft account for about one in every four plates

of his satirical series on Spanish life, the Caprichos,

Goya's first great graphic masterpiece and a milestone, both in the history of satire

and in the development of fine etching technique.

In February 1799,

Goya paid for a newspaper ad in the Diario de Madrid, which announced its publication.

The author, he declared, "has selected from among the innumerable foibles and follies

"to be found in any civilised society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices

"which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual,

"those subjects which he feels to be suitable material for satire and which, at the same time,

"stimulate the artist's imagination."

About 20 of the plates referred to witchcraft.

Some 25 were about sex and marriage,

seduction, prostitution,

kidnapping, rape,

and, in general, the miseries of love.

He gets at monks and priests,

the Inquisition,

the wiles of quacks and doctors,

the pretensions and follies of aristocrats.

It's a pretty complete indictment.

He doesn't believe that women are good and faithful, or that men are decent and honourable,

or that those in power deserve to be.

All three he treats as fantasies.

He won't accept the familiar scheme of goodies and baddies,

because, to him, all Madrid society is linked in a series of agreements

or, to put it bluntly, deals.

"I grab from you, you grab from me.

"Each of us loses and each gets something."

These were risky things

for a court painter, of all people, to be saying,

and the series was a giant commercial flop.

Only 27 sets out of the original 300 sold.

The public Goya hoped for,

that he wanted to create, that he wanted to find,

just didn't get it.

Well, you know, I've had a lot of success, OK? Of all kinds.

At the same time, I have felt...that a lot of my work has NOT been seen.

It's been seen, but it's not been seen. There's a certain avoidance within the art world to see it.

-That's because of its political, or aggressive, or whatever the hell we're talking about...

-Mm-hm.

-..attitude. And it's not just true of me, but of a fair number of artists.

-Do you think it's true of Goya?

-Yup.

The only way society protects itself, finally, is by not seeing them.

Then when the artist has departed and the situation's over,

-they can say, "Ah, yes! We understand you!"

-"What a master!"

-What? ..Yeah.

And then it's partly recognised politically,

but it's sort of aestheticised after 25, 30, 50 years, and so on.

Because it's aestheticised,

it permits the general public to look at it with less, uh...squeamishness.

But if it's right in their face, they don't like to look at it.

Of all the hundreds of prints that Goya did, this one -

The Dream Of Reason Brings Forth Monsters - is the most famous.

It is Goya's summing up of his belief in the supremacy of reason,

but the weakness of that supremacy.

Goya was certainly no atheist.

He despised superstition, he hated priestly corruption, but he was very much on the side of faith.

I don't think he could have brought off his last great church commission otherwise -

the decoration of the dome and vaults of a small church in Madrid, San Antonio de la Florida.

The story that Goya tells in this church wasn't new -

it went back to the 13th century - and it probably wasn't true,

but, my God, it was well told.

It concerns St Anthony of Padua, a Fransiscan monk in Italy,

who, one day, received the news that his father, who was living in Portugal, had murdered a man.

Naturally, St Anthony didn't believe this,

so he flew, miraculously, to Lisbon,

where he was able to raise the corpse from the dead,

and the corpse spoke and said, "No, it wasn't your father, it was that guy over there."

The saint's father was released, and Goya had the chance of a lifetime, several hundred years later,

to paint this extraordinary crowd of people reacting, or, in some cases, NOT reacting to a miracle,

and creating what was, in effect, a terrific panorama

of street life on a paseo of Madrid, high in the sky.

A vast theatre of emotion is in this dome -

wonder, doubt, gaping curiosity, dumb piety.

These faces are real, lived-in,

not polished and idealised.

This is not late-rococo religious froth.

It plainly affirms Goya's interest and faith in plain people.

Charles Dickens would have loved it.

By 1808, the external politics of Spain had become dreadfully complicated.

Napoleon managed to smuggle a whole army into Spain,

to trick Charles IV, his Queen, and their son, Ferdinand, into going to France, where they were interned.

Then Napoleon put his own brother, Joseph, on the throne in Madrid, backed by a French army.

The people of Madrid rebelled.

With knives, clubs and their teeth,

they attacked a force of Napoleon's Egyptian mercenaries on the Puerta del Sol, the main square of Madrid,

on the 2nd of May, 1808.

Next day, Napoleon's army rounded up everyone who looked like an insurgent

and shot them without trial.

Thus the 2nd and the 3rd of May became dates of tremendous symbolic importance -

the rebirth of Spanish identity, the start of a great war of national liberation

that the Spanish would win against all the odds, against the greatest war machine in Europe.

And Goya became the tragic poet of this process,

the first great war reporter in art.

He set to work on a monumental series of etchings,

entitled Fatal Consequences Of The Bloody War Against Bonaparte In Spain With Other Emphatic Caprices.

It's known for short as the Disasters Of War.

He was 62 now, much too old for a war correspondent,

a breed of journalist that in any case didn't exist yet,

and too deaf even to hear a gunshot.

"Yo lo vi," - "I saw this,"

he inscribed underneath one plate of refugees fleeing from a village.

But perhaps he didn't see it.

Some of the atrocities he drew -

the executions, the dismemberings, the rapes - he could not have seen and got away from alive.

He wanted the fiction of being an eyewitness...

..so he created a wholly new form,

that of vivid, camera-cannot-lie, pictorial journalism,

long before the invention of the camera.

Art as an act of witnessing,

drawing its power and its propaganda from its immediacy.

Art as a lie in the service of truth.

The illusion of being there when dreadful things,

unimaginable things, happen to ordinary people.

I was researching Goya's prices the other day,

and one of the things that really amazed me, the cheapest prints of all are the Disasters Of War.

-Even now?

-Even now.

-And they're the greatest.

-And they're the greatest.

Nobody wants - except a few maniacs - nobody wants to look at ugly things, OK?

We recognise that our lives are relatively short.

We want to have pleasure, OK? We want to have some orgasms here and there.

We want to enjoy some landscapes.

We want to enjoy automobiles and the whole business, OK? Why the hell do I have to look at this junk for?

-Do you enjoy looking at Goya?

-Yes.

-D'you enjoy looking at the Disasters Of War, at the Black Paintings?

-Yes, I think they're beautiful.

But Goya fools you into believing that he's just saying how it was.

That's why the Disasters can still bring tears to your eyes and mine.

In war, ineloquence is best.

Photography has made us used to every kind of disaster, even to catastrophes like September 11 2001,

which produced hundreds of thousands of images, amateur and professional.

In Goya's time, any record of witness was rare

and witnessing on this scale was simply impossible.

Only later do you realise how constructive the Disasters are.

I think this was why Goya is still the god, the father figure, of every war photographer I've known.

He could stare right down the beast's throat and not look away.

Goya never made a cent from the Disasters. They weren't even printed until 1863, decades after his death.

Throughout the war, he never drew any money from the salary due him as chief court painter,

so he needed a big commission when the war was won

and asked to be allowed to paint the moments of national glory from 1808,

the Attack On The Mamelukes, or the Second Of May, for short,

and the Execution Of The Patriots, or the Third Of May,

both of which he finished in 1814.

The Second Of May is a confused melee.

It's almost chaotic, this record of men in the throes of anger and fear,

stabbing and hacking at one another.

Look at that boy on the right,

afraid to stab, afraid not to stab.

To me, though, the greater of the two paintings is the Third Of May,

where the suspected rebels are being lined up and shot by the French firing squads.

Goya was in Madrid at the time. Did he see the killings?

Probably not.

But the power with which he imagined them, you can't get that out of your mind.

It has such a grand, tragic kind of construction to the whole thing, that there's really nothing like it.

I mean, it's very simple, and yet it has tremendous resonance.

The French firing squad - those anonymous backs leaning forward into the recoil of those big muskets,

but you don't register them as people,

whereas there's an intense humanity on every face of their victims.

And then it all reaches a climax in that little Christ of the people

in his white shirt, blazing with defiance, throwing out his arms

in one last assertion of the primacy of life over death.

You can't look at it without the impulse to weep.

The extraordinary thing about the way that he paints the dead in this picture

is that the blood is paint,

but it has that kind of scratchy, half-dried quality that looks as though it actually is blood,

as though the application of that pigment to the surface was done

by the twitching hands of men who were dying and whose hands had already been dabbled in the blood.

It has this very pressing reality. It tries to be true, not beautiful.

I think it's one of the great pictures of all time...

by anybody.

It is no longer true that bullfighting is the national sport of Spain. Soccer is.

But in Goya's day, the ritual of the bullring was central to Spanish identity.

And today, I don't care what the self-appointed humanitarians think,

I want to see fox-hunting preserved and bullfighting even more.

Goya is everywhere in Spain still,

a national passion.

Whole fiestas and bullfights, like this one in Ronda,

the spiritual heart of Spanish bullfighting, are dedicated to him.

Goya returned to bullfighting often, right through his painting career.

It was part of the old Spain that fed his imagination. In this, he was set against good liberal opinion.

The ilustrados, the enlightened liberals, wanted bullfighting banned

and it was banned for a while by Charles IV.

But you might as well have tried to ban baseball in America by an act of Congress.

Some things are just not culturally feasible.

In 1816, when Goya set out on his great etchings of the arena,

La Tauromaquia, Spain had just won the war against the French

and I can't help seeing Goya's series as his affirmation of his country.

Its 33 plates are partly a history of the ritual, but it's a fanciful history.

From primitive Iberians hunting the bull, to the modern corrida, with its passes and suertes,

and star toreadors,

some of whom Goya knew personally.

In describing all this, he vented his obsessions.

He also recorded some of the tabloid sensations of the bullring,

such as the bull that jumped into the front rows of the Madrid arena

and gored to death the mayor of Torrejon,

an image of almost incredible modernity and power,

with scattering figures on the right

played off against the void, the empty space on the left.

Technically, the bullfights are brilliant etchings.

Their use of two personages, light and dark, sun and shadow, gives them a tremendous narrative grip.

No images of bullfighting have approached them since, not even, or especially not, Picasso's.

He was into his 70s now.

His glory days at court were over.

The restored king, that hulking, absolutist toad, Ferdinand VII,

he didn't like him much, and the feeling was mutual.

Most of his friends were dead.

His wife, of whom we know nothing, had died in 1812,

though his only son, Xavier, was alive.

He was still preyed on by illness.

It wouldn't let him go. In 1820, the year he turned 74, it left an unforgettable painting,

Goya's self-portrait with his friend and physician, Dr Arrieta,

one of the most beautiful testaments of skill, compassion and caring friendship ever painted.

A long way from the harsh satire on quacks in the Caprichos.

Not so many artists can surprise you at that age.

We dream of a great late style, but few achieve it.

But, like Titian, Goya actually did.

He reached deep into himself and pulled out something grand and frightening and unexpected.

Goya had bought a farmhouse across the river from Madrid.

It was called the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man's House,

not actually after Goya, but after its previous owner, a farmer who was also stone-deaf.

He was solitary and he populated the walls of the Deaf Man's House

with the phantoms of his imagination.

From a modern perspective, these pictures which even now we can scarcely understand,

are the climax of his long career.

They got called the Black Paintings simply because they're so dark,

dark in colour, dark in meaning.

He painted them directly on the plaster in oils,

which has made them a nightmare for conservators ever since.

They might have been destroyed because after Goya's death the farmhouse was demolished,

but it was bought by a French property speculator who had the murals detached from the walls

and remounted on canvas, which is how we see them today in the Prado.

There isn't a coherent narrative.

There are scenes of witch covens, scenes of pilgrimage,

hideously vital old crones slurping up their soup.

There are Biblical figures, such as Judith killing King Holofernes,

but absolutely no references to Jesus or to God.

There is a terrifying reprise of his theme of the San Isidro pilgrimage.

But now they're chanting or howling.

They're making some kind of semi-animal noise, anyway.

But they can't be heard.

They're the creatures of Goya's own deafness,

imprisoned on the other side of the glass.

He's a man at the end of his rope and yet he's painting it explicitly.

He couldn't have continued painting if he didn't start to let these monsters come out.

-No, because he'd have been involved in an act of self-censorship.

-Yes.

-He never censored himself.

Absolutely. Well, there wasn't much left to censor!

Saturn, the god of melancholy and, not incidentally, the patron god of artists,

eating one of his own children, as in the Greek myth.

Is there another face in European art more frighted with hunger and despair,

with the horror of self-awareness?

The Greek Fates hovering in the air...

..measuring and snipping the thread of human life.

And that famous dog peering over a ledge,

or perhaps trying to raise its head above the quicksand

in which it's drowning.

Goya saw more pathos in that dog

than Rubens could get into a whole Crucifixion.

-He's mad at the world, but he's also mad within himself.

-But he's crazy like an artist, not like a madman.

He's crazy like a genius.

He's absolutely in control.

He's out of control and he's in control.

You can't separate the two with him.

It's like this.

That's his power.

Goya was no more mad than Shakespeare was when he wrote the mad scenes for Ophelia or King Lear.

Furious and inspired, yes.

But infused with an icy control.

And it's the combination of the fury and the control that announces the genius.

I admire him so much, but he also frightens me because the thing about Goya is his authenticity.

You feel that the demons that inhabit his work come absolutely out of the centre of his being.

They're completely familiar to him.

It's like he has breakfast with them.

They are what we are.

And he shows this with complete lack of any sort of embarrassment or pretence.

You know, when you look at the Black Paintings,

that there go I.

The two men sunk up to their waists in the bog,

belting at each other with sticks

could be north and south Ireland, they could be Bosnia, Kosovo.

They could be Talibans and Americans,

just about any insoluble conflict between human beings,

which is brought about by the madness of religion and property.

That's why these are so powerful.

They don't propagandise, but they leave you with no choice

but to empathise with them and to realise that it could be you, it could be me

and it probably is.

In the end, he couldn't bear the Spain of Ferdinand any more.

In 1824, aged 78, he asked his monarch for leave to go to a French spa to take the curative waters.

He got permission.

But he wasn't going to come back. Finally, this quintessential Spaniard was an exile.

He settled in Bordeaux where his old friend, the writer Moratin, also an exile,

reported that, "Goya has indeed arrived. Old, clumsy and weak, without a word of French,

"and so happy and so anxious to try everything.

"He ate with us, just as though he were a student,

"and he kept drawing and drawing and drawing."

One of his sketches sums it up, I think, an old man on sticks,

hobbling along, forging ahead against his infirmity.

He's staring us straight in the face and over him Goya has written,

"Aun aprendo," - "I'm still learning."

He died on April 16, 1828.

He was 82 years old.

He was buried in Bordeaux.

In 1901, his remains were dug up and brought back to Spain.

In 1929, they were moved and buried again,

this time, in the church that he'd frescoed in Madrid, San Antonio de la Florida.

Now he lies under the beautiful girl angels he had painted there.

Well, nearly all of him does.

When Goya was moved back from France, someone stole his head.

It has never been found.

One hopes it is somewhere in Spain.

This is the bit where one's supposed to sum Goya up, wrap him up neatly, draw a line around his achievements.

Well, I can't. Goya doesn't respond to such approaches any more than other big figures of his century do.

There is no plausible way to put Beethoven in a capsule,

or to say what the essence of Dickens was.

Goya was one of those rare artists who had the daring, or folly,

to take on the whole scale of human fate.

It was a huge scale.

And nobody works on it today because our sense of the possibility of art, what it can do,

what it can say and why it can matter is so depleted.

It never occurred to Goya that art might NOT be able to say anything and everything about our nature,

our desires and our fears.

He just assumed that it could and he went ahead.

By assuming it, he left us with the difficult task of living up to his peculiar intensity.

And if we can't, as is likely, at least he shows us that.

Nearly 200 years after he died, to meet Goya is still to meet ourselves.

Subtitles on 888 by BBC Scotland Subtitling BBC Scotland 2002

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