Lecture given by Antonio Elorza, historian, on 25 January 2020.

In the Portrait of Floridablanca (1784), Goya presents an emblem of enlightened despotism: the haughty minister, confidently looking towards the future thanks to the support symbolised by the portrait of Charles III, while the documentation of his planned reforms is piled around the table. The reforming zeal of the servants of Charles III shed light on the country’s major problems, but their implementation soon ran up against the interests of those who held power (the privileged classes and the clergy).

It was therefore not long before the enlightened elites—Jovellanos, Meléndez Valdés, and even the periodical El Censor itself, protected by Floridablanca—came to realise that reformism was doomed to failure and that it was essential to undertake a radical critique of the enemies of the Enlightenment, while also opening discussion towards political freedom. A staunch advocate of being “liberal” rather than “servile” in art, Goya fully embraced this social and political impulse, despite his position as painter to the king and the repressive atmosphere following the French Revolution. His formula was the combination of critical reason and “fantasy” that he defined in the famous Capricho No. 43. Deafness intensified the sense of despair by pointing to “monsters” that were all too real. His yearning for freedom led him, then—as later in the face of Ferdinand VII’s repression—to flirt with danger in his denunciation of despotism.

Later, amid the full catastrophe of The Disasters of War, he glimpsed the possibility of light dispelling darkness with the Constitution of 1812—truth, reason and freedom, which ought to prevail over reactionaries (drawing Divine Reason, Do Not Leave a Single One) but do not succeed. What follows is only despair, the rule of monstrous powers, before which nothing remains but the cry—perhaps embodied in the Black Paintings of the Quinta in the dog emerging into view.

This video includes simultaneous interpretation in Spanish Sign Language (LSE).