![]() What he delivers is a shocking immediacy. ![]() His first remit is to make bodies come forth. Figures gleam, figures loom: in Goya’s handling, even their blacks are bright. The courtiers surge into view in pastings of lead-white paint-the glow of cheeks and collars, the shimmer of sashes and muslin, the brilliance of buttons. For Goya, to portray is emphatically to illuminate. Witches, mules, and mutants jump up, abrupt islands of whiteness, from the dusky aquatint textures of the Caprichos: and when, in some of the Desastres de la guerra, the sheet is almost shadowless, we confront the hardest, harshest sunlight that ever shone. We think how the bright bodies of Goya’s Majas, both naked and clothed, pulse out their summons to lust as if lit from within. ![]() We think of the terrible dazzle on the shirt of the laborer in Goya’s vast canvas The Third of May 1808-the sure target for the squad lined up to shoot him. The art of Francisco Goya has stood as a beacon over the cultural landscape during the nearly two centuries since his death, at age eighty-two, in 1828. ![]() ![]() Francisco Goya: The Pilgrimage to San Isidro, 1820–1823 ![]()
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