Francisco Goya - independence in Spanish

 

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Spanish (1746 –1828)

 Francisco de Goya was born on March 30, 1746. His life and singular creative adventure took place in times of extreme social, political and cultural convulsion. At the passage of the 18th to the 19th Century, Spain, Europe and America were going through profound transformation and changes in their fundamental structures, bringing to an end the political and social regimen in evident decline and causing the triumph and slow consolidation of the new state of being and understanding of the world: modernism.

During Goya's lifetime, from 1746 and 1828, the years Goya lived, a series of especially significant events happened in the history of humanity and, in particular, of the western world: the publication of L'Enciclopëdie (1751), the process towards the Independence of the United States of America and the presentation of its Constitution (1787), the fall of the Bastille in Paris and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France (1789), the execution of the French monarchs (1793), Napoleon's victory over the Directoire (1799) and his coronation as Emperor (1803), the "Napoleonic" War in Europe, the abdication of Charles IV, King of Spain and the beginning of the "Independence War" in Spain (1808), the abdication of Napoleon (1812), the celebration of the Congress of Vienna and the "Holy Alliance" (1815), several proclamations of independence in Spanish and Portuguese America - Venezuela and Colombia (1811-1819), Argentina (1816), Mexico (1821), Brazil (1822).

If these events represent in themselves the expression of a radical process of transformation, of no less importance is the fact that this period coincides with the lives and creative activities of great intellectual men: among whom were Montesquieu, Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Winckelmann, D'Alembert, Diderot, Hegel, Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Comte, Pushkin, Balzac, Novalis, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Feuerbach, Byron, W. Scott, Feijoo, Samaniego, Jovellanos. At the same time, extraordinary scientific and technological advancements took place, thanks to the investigations of Linneo, Lavoisier, Laplace, Jenner, Malthus, Humboldt, Darwin, Stephenson, Niepce, and others. In the music world, there were the works created by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, and others. In painting, for longer or shorter periods of time, the following well known and influential artists were Goya's contemporaries: Giaquinto, Tiepolo, Guardi, Piranesi, Mengs, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hogarth, Constable, Turner, Fragonard, David, Ingres, Delacroix, Gëricault, and Corot, to name a few.

 

Goya's works and his peculiar aesthetic evolution were essentially affected by these times of deep transformations, and they express, in a way that cannot be seen in any other contemporary creator, the contradictions that were pertinent to those times in which one "lived dangerously". His personal and creative adventure, his singular existential dramaturgy, is the exact representation of an emotive and painful conquest of liberty from reason to imagination, united and feeding themselves altogether, with no possible paradox, a horrible and unequal fight for the future and modernism, throwing away any conformism or sterile conventionalism. Goya had the luck, or the misfortune, depending on the way you look at it, of living in difficult times and periods in which it was necessary to take committed and risky decisions, or survive abandoning oneself to the waves of the storm, worrying only about keeping oneself afloat and waiting out the storm.

In difficult times, times in which everything, including the future, is in radical discussion or doubt, when the apparently solid and functional structures start to tremble on its foundations and crumble floor by floor, façades and hollows of staircases, when everything seems reversed and mirrors are no good and speculation to save any image of the day before, when words change their meaning or lose their impact because of the abuse one gives them as the only illusory last resort, one always finds a few exceptional human beings. Those nameless or historically recognized persons succeed in articulating "strong" thoughts and a new concept in which they join the will, intentions and involvement with hope, or building more effective idealistic constructions (with recycled materials saved from the disaster, or other new materials created by pressing need), or generating powerful black points that attract and condense the way we see this universe of 360 degrees of absurd argument/pointless argument/unintelligible argument. They invent new words or literature in which each meaning corresponds not only to a whole group of signs and sounds but also to a precise ideogram and an exact score, or they experiment with a new language of expressions, smiles, grimaces, with the whole body, without uttering a verb, an adjective or a noun, and those that need neither simultaneous translation nor interactive programs to learn them.

Certainly, all times and periods are difficult, but some are more so than others, because for them apparently the future is no longer possible, nor to be hoped for. Those of Goya were like that, as at few other moments in History. Those of today seem to be like that too, because everybody has agreed to say so, everywhere, and to build all kinds of phrases, using words which are lexically very similar, such as crisis, critical point or to criticize, and others. Among those daring and committed, adventurous or courageous human beings who live at the limit of their forces, are the artists, the craftsmen of thought, architects of ideas, generators of images and feelings, book inventors, story tellers and poets of the body, all of them provokers and terrorists of the established disorder, stateless, unbelievers, agnostics of all dogma, and of their poor and insignificant daily safety.

In most parts, and with more or less success, this state of things and attitude was called, and is called (in spite of the meaning one wishes to give it), modernism. In addition, the taxidermists of History gave it a name that will was immediately devaluated by the overuse of one recurrent word, Romanticism. Words that in the end can induce error and very superficial losses, but which the urgency justifies their use, in this case to speak about Goya, his unique existential and creative voyage in those difficult times, since then until now. (...)