I’ve been working further on my soft pastel version of Goya’s plate 39, Great deeds! Against the dead! Early on my drawing started out as a naive image, coloured as a child might (working from memory), brown trees, green leaves and a blue sky, with limited shadows. However this looked too saccharine, the powdery nature of the soft pastel added to the icing sugar look. So I looked into some contemporary pastel artists and discovered Jacob Aguiar, who employs an impressionistic style to great effect. My issue is I’m copying a print, which I still want to be recognisable as Goya’s print. I’m also thinking about adding the bodies as white ghosts as in my pencil sketch, this will enable the link to the original and free me up to improve on the pastel as a painting. However I appreciate that either way my pastel does require more work.
I’ve considered working from nature initially and then working back towards Goya’s print. To that end today I studied the trees whilst walking our dogs. However, our damp environment in the UK causes our trees to be covered in a green algae, so I’ve utilised the internet, and tasked my parents who live in Spain with taking photos of half-dead trees in bright sunshine. Further to this the oak species are different, in Spain the predominate oak is evergreen, having small, pale, holly like leaves (whilst still bearing acorns).
This continued focus on plate 39 has made me think more about its creation by Goya. In my dissertation I considered the argument that the ‘Disasters of War’ prints were journalistic, concluding that the scenes were probably not witnessed by Goya firsthand, at least not the acts of defilement or extreme violence (as agreed by Hughes and Hofer). I suspect that it is likely that this image is more akin to the allegorical scenes, as in Goya’s the “caprichos enfáticos” (meaning fantasy). I considered other readings of the scene, Vial-Kayser and Jake Chapman have associated the image with a crucifixion of sorts. Christians after all have been crucified both vertically (as Christ was) and upside down (as per St. Peter), they’ve also been emasculated (castrated), and dismembered (whether metaphorical as in the ‘Fractio panis’ or indeed the Holy Roman Empire employed the system themselves as a means of torture). Then I wondered about the number of corpses, do they represent the three crucified on the hill, a rogue either side of Christ as described in the Bible, and depicted by many artists such as in Ruebens’ Christ on the Cross between the Two Thieves (1619-20). So who is being crucified? The bodies are unclothed, and have not been identified. I wonder if Goya is depicting the crucifixion of faith or even god himself! Maybe the three bodies represent the holy trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?
Goya’s work could be a reflection on the horrors of war which had played out on his doorstep. Had they made him question his faith and the existence of God; a would be risky business in 19th Century Spain, what with the resurrection of the Inquisition. This could have been his way of communicating his nihilistic feelings. Jung stated that “crucifixion symbolizes the state of supreme torture through conflict”, maybe this is Goya’s objective, to depict Spain as being forsaken by God. Maybe the bodies on the tree are the main protagonists of the conflict: Napoleon (or the Pope), his brother Joseph who ruled Spain for Napoleon, and the Spanish heir, Ferdinand VII?
The tree on which the corpses are hung is surely a Spanish oak tree, battered, broken yet still alive and just about with leaf; I imagine that this tree represents Spain. Goya also seems to question the vatican’s position in the war (since the Catholic Church played a large part in Napoleon’s rise to power) from supporter to having papal land occupied to the Popes kidnapping and 6 year incarceration. In Spain the church was both persecuted and neglectful. This was depicted in the ‘caprichos’ where a cardinal walked a tight rope (plate 77), and oversaw the death of truth (plate 79) whilst monks witnessed the signing of the new Spanish constitution (plate 74) a terrible charter for the people of Spain.
As the Chapman brothers have highlighted this print has far more layers of possible meaning than the obvious reading.
