Voces del Prado

Great Artists and Privileged Minds

Manuela Mena Marqués, Head of the Department of Conservation of 18th Century Painting and Goya, 1978-2019

History’s greatest artists, who aren’t that many, were also figures who possessed a superior intelligence, like great scientists or great philosophers. I don’t see any difference between Goya’s mind and that of Goethe, for example. I don’t see any difference between Praxiteles and Plato either. You have to think like this in order to understand art, so that you refrain from uttering uncouth comments when talking about painting or art; in order to refrain from saying things that clash with what the great artists show us, the artists who really teach us.
All works have something that is essential and impressive, something that moves us, something that might make us laugh, something that conveys the personality of the artist, as we can see in Goya’s works. When we go into the Goya Rooms we have everything ranging from his Naked Maja, whom he conceived as a Venus, to his portraits of figures of the age who were truly ugly, but which he manages to interpret in such a way that he is able to offer us a series of examples of how to understand a person before us, even two hundred years later. This is what he did, for example, with The Duchess of Abrantes.