Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

And Goya uses every pretext to present his figures, not as articulated bodies, but as looming shapes, which are as eloquent in their silhouettes as they are mysterious in their identity and often their actions.

Artist Francisco de Goya was born on March 30, 1746, in Fuendetodos, Spain. He studied painting in Madrid and Rome. In 1786 he was appointed painter to the king. After Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, he maintained his seat. He made a series of etchings, The Disasters of War, which recorded the invasion in detail. In 1824, he left for Bordeaux, France where he lived until his death in 1828.
(born March 30, 1746, Fuendetodos, Spain—died April 16, 1828, Bordeaux, France) Spanish artist whose paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. The series of etchingsThe Disasters of War (1810–14) records the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion. His masterpieces in painting include The Naked Maja, The Clothed Maja ( 1800–05), and The 3rd of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid (1814).

Biography.com, “Francisco di Goya”

“Goya seems to have come to take it for granted that a human being with power or authority over another will abuse it to ruin the other to dismember, deprave, despoil, relentlessly, gratuitously. Maybe the scenes in The Disasters of War of the pointless butchery which the victors inflict on the vanquished tell us no more about Goya himself than that, like any humane and rational being, he loathed the excesses of war. Maybe the scenes in the Caprices in which the old sell or corrupt their charges tell us no more about him than that he was a sharp social satirist. His witches’ sabbaths where babies and foetuses are roasted are not proof that he assumed, even unconsciously, that all women would rather eat than feed children. But there can be no doubt as to the depth of his despair in the face of his guarded inscription on a drawing in the Prado of an attractive young woman seated cuddling a small child: ‘She seems to be a good woman.’ Love is exceptional. Depictions of tenderness and compassion are found among the famine scenes of the Disasters: love flowers in the context of deprivation. A loving care is portrayed in the painting made in 119 of The Last Communion of Sanjoside Calasanz. It is curiously prophetic of the Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta – both are images of a suffering man sustained by a man who is feeding him.

“The mouth plays a role in Goya’s art more prominent than in that of any other major artist. Mouths leer, grin, gape, gasp, moan, shriek, belch. A hanged man’s mouth lies open and a woman reaches up to filch his teeth. Grown men stick fingers in their mouths like sucking infants. Mouths vomit, the sick gushing out of them, and a great furry beast sicks up a pile of human bodies. Mouths guzzle: they guzzle avidly, ferociously, living flesh as well as dead. Saturn grips one of his children in his fists and with his mouth tears him limb from limb.