Preview

Francisco de Goya - Los Caprichos

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1608 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Francisco de Goya - Los Caprichos
Francisco de Goya
El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos

Francisco de Goya can rightly be registered as one of the three geniuses in Spanish painting i.e. the third master along-side with El Greco and Velasquez. Francisco de Goya produced most of his masterpieces between the 1760s and 1828 and with his works of art he is already the forerunner of the trends and tendencies so typical of the 20th century and it is far from being surprising that he is considered to be the predecessor of modern trends in painting like expressionism and surrealism.

His paintings, etchings, drawings and his graphics can be characterised with their diversity both in their topics and artistic means. This richness in themes leads to a wide variety of topics ranging from joyful festivities through royal portraits to battle scenes and dead bodies. There is a marked shift in his choice of themes and this gradual change can be viewed as an accompanying phenomenon of his physical degradation since the great affliction in his life, his deafness, caused him to turn to themes depicting more and more gloom and despair. His general mood must have become darker and darker in the course of time as it is reflected in his pieces of art. On approaching the end of his life he painted frightening pictures about mad and sick people and about strange and freak figures. The style of these black paintings already shows the signs of expressionism.

Francisco de Goya created a series of eighty print sin 1799 with the title „Los Caprichos”. This series palpably demonstrates Goya’s views on the world and on the whole mankind.
This opinion of his is well-illustrated by Linda Simon’s lines quoted here. This series demonstrates „the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices with custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual” “Los Caprichos”



Bibliography: Mark, Williams, The Story of Spain. Málaga: Santana Books, 2009 (Links Retrieved: 27 April 2010): http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/goya/9g/91/43capric.html http://www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/reasonfantasy/lrundquist1.htm http://www.dramairok.hu/data/files/1977/goya.pdf http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=12796 http://eeweems.com/goya/sleep_of_reason.html http://www.museum.cornell.edu/HFJ/Handbook/hb128.html The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Alexander Nehamas, Representations, No. 74, Philosophies in Time (Spring, 2001) (http://www.jstor.org/pss/3176048) The Sleep of Reason, Linda Simon (www.worldandi.com)

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Francisco de Goya

    • 733 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Francisco went to Madrid in 1763 because he hoped to win a prize at the Academy of san Fernando. He ended up not winning but he did meet Francisco Bayeu. He had a great affect on Francisco Goya's early style of painting, he also was responsible for Goya's participation in the fresco decoration of the Church of the Virgin in El Pilar in Zaragoza.…

    • 733 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Goya became devoted with depicting the physical and psychological suffering, and moral tortures inflicted by the Spanish court and church. He disguised his repulsion with satire, however, such as in disturbing “black paintings” he did on the walls of his villa, Quinta del Sordo (house of the deaf). The fourteen large murals in black, brown, and gray of 1820-22 present appalling monsters engaged in sinister acts.…

    • 151 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Francisco Jose de Goya

    • 925 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Goya started discovering art at a young age. He was born to José Benito de Goya y Franque, a gilder, and Gracia de Lucientes y Salvador. Francisco spent his childhood in Fuendetodos, Spain then later moved to Zaragoza. He often moved, mastering art along the way. In 1773 Goya married Josefa Bayeu. Over a period of five years he had painted about 42 designs. His popularity began to lead him into an entire world of art. During the middle of his career, Goya often painted for royalty. He had reached his peak of popularity with the noble ones. However between late 1792 and early1793, a serious illness, whose exact nature is not known, left Goya deaf, and he became withdrawn. During his recuperation, he undertook a series of experimental paintings. He turned to more manageable and more personal projects, perhaps inspired by works from abroad that he had seen while in Cadiz. His small pictures of 1793-4 introduce a new era in his art, and it was now that his style began to emerge. Many of his scenes depict bullfighting, intense, haunting themes, reflective of the artist 's fear of insanity, and his outlook on humanity. Although these themes can be seen in many of his paintings, I believe “Yard with Lunatics” depicts his style the best.…

    • 925 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Spain has produced some of the world-class painters. Francisco de Goya and Pablo Picasso exist among the ranks of Spain’s most internationally acclaimed artist. These two influential artists use their artwork as a platform to protest against social injustices. Goya and Picasso, works can be understood to address Social Protest Art, but artist handles the subject in their own unique way. Goya and Picasso were both prolific artists of their times, offering works of great visual travesty of the glories of warfare and bloody victory.…

    • 85 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Towards the end of his career he moved to painting more still lifes, the more anti-social he became, the more interested he was in inanimate, inhuman objects.…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Degas's Metamorphosis

    • 344 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Edgar Degas was a famous French artist that created many precious paintings and sculptures. However, Degas developed diabetic retinopathy which led to the loss of his vision. As Edgar Degas lost his vision, his art style and the way he created his art changed. For example, Degas swapped out oil for pastels as his material of choice. Also, Degas’s paintings became very crude and his only option was to create sculptures. Degas’s impediment changed his art career for the worse.…

    • 344 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Best Essays

    Giotto di Bondone and Pablo Picasso, two of the greatest artists in history, greatly influenced today’s art and its techniques. Both of them broke the boundaries applied to their time and expressed space in ways that had never been seen before. Nonetheless, there exist differences between the two. For instance, their artistic styles and stages differed. While Giotto painted in the Gothic period and in the style of frescoe, Picasso, being a painter of the twentieth century, had many styles and stages broken down into periods to his works. His most famous period, also known as the most radical art of the twentieth century, has been Cubism. Furthermore, Giotto dealt largely in traditional religious subjects, something…

    • 2681 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Good Essays

    725), but an artist who uses his art to bring consciousness of issues forward into his patrons or public, facilitates conversation, which can lead to a conversation about assumptions and perspectives. Francisco Goya was such an artist. His works in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were depictions of his assumptions in conjunction with his reflections of his reality, “Problem posing involves making a taken-for-granted situation problematic, raising questions regarding its validity,” (Mezirow, 1991, p. 105); Goya reviewed the problems of man and his country in his work and challenged his viewers to confront their assumptions. Goya’s, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (see figure 1) provides different perspectives on a society that is caught on the precipice of change, reason, and romanticism. “This can be read both as an endorsement of rationalism and as a warning that the surrender of reason can result in disorder and misery. Or it can be seen as a sign that the faith in reason to solve human problems had ended only in creating nightmares” (Fleming, 1991, p. 466). This etching, along with many other Goya works, create a sense of discomfort or trigger a sense of anxiety in the viewer, from which he can avoid or become aware, which begins the transformational learning process (Mezirow, 1991, p. 147). Art can also act as Parker Palmer’s third thing: “Rightly used a third thing functions a bit like the old Rorschach inkblot test, evoking from us whatever the soul wants us to attend to” (2004, p. 93). In the case of art, it invites the soul to speak, which can invite the mind to listen and eventually achieve…

    • 1400 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Francisco Goya Carnival

    • 425 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Furthermore, the artist composes the print with defined lines to emphasize his inner turmoil. Goya’s most perceivable figures are created with an increased intensity of vigorous lines. In doing so, the audience is forced to focus on the four main figures. Despite having etched so many lines, the upper portion of the piece is left completely untouched. The purity of the section shows a slightness of hope or light emerging within the horrors of the…

    • 425 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Third of May, 1808 in Madrid by Francisco Goya was painted in 1814 and it is currently in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. Goya was a Spanish painter during the Romanticism movement. He is considered one of the first modernist painters as he changed his style later on in his career to capture the ills of man. Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 is a remarkable anti-war statement was revolutionary for its time, and is still considered today an true icon because of the raw emotions it provokes.…

    • 613 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One notable artist that partook in the Romantic Movement was Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. In spite of his initial lack of success, and even being denied entrance to the Royal Academy of Fine Art, Goya eventually found his way amongst the monarchy and the royalty by designing patterns that would soon decorate the residences of greatly important people, and then by painting commissioned portraits of counts, dukes, and even the king. These events allowed him to rise into fame, as Goya became painter to Charles III and court painter to Charles IV themselves. As the years went by, though, Goya had contracted cholera and dove into withdrawal and isolation, creating more bitter and sombre paintings. In the later years of his life, he isolated himself in a two-story house baptised “the Deaf Man’s Villa” (in reference to the previous owner and not himself, who was coincidentally left deaf from his cholera.) Here, he painted a series of fourteen untitled paintings known as the “Black Paintings.” To say the least, each of the pieces were more bitter and macabre than the next, the ultimate one being Saturn Devouring His Son.…

    • 733 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Disasters of War

    • 539 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The name by which the series is known today is not Goya's own. His handwritten title on an album of proofs given to a friend reads: Fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices (Spanish: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). Aside from the titles or captions given to each print, these are Goya's only known words on the series. With these works, he breaks from a number of painterly traditions. He rejects the bombastic heroics of most previous Spanish war art to show the effect of conflict on individuals. In addition he abandons colour in favour of a more direct truth he found in shadow and shade.…

    • 539 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    James Ensors Intrigue

    • 1598 Words
    • 7 Pages

    His early works used dimmer colors and were more of the realist style. (The Art of Being Human 152)Many of his later works have depictions of skeletons, masks, phantoms and demons. He was a cynical man who became more so with age. I would say that he was a rebel of his time. He hated the socialite culture of Belgium and showed it through his works. His works were…

    • 1598 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Baroque Period

    • 1696 Words
    • 7 Pages

    When looking at the outwork of this time I was shocked to see how life like a lot of this artist made their paintings. These show the times in which was going on during the time of Jesus death and the feelings in which the people where going through.…

    • 1696 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Primitivism

    • 5733 Words
    • 23 Pages

    Whether and to what extent we should simplify our lives and get "back to basics" is a debate that has been going on since the invention of writing.[2] In antiquity the superiority of the simple life was expressed in the Myth of the Golden Age, depicted in the genre of European poetry and visual art known as the Pastoral. The debate about the merits and demerits of a simple, versus a complex life, gained new urgency with the European encounter with hitherto unknown peoples after the exploration of the Americas and Pacific Islands by Columbus and others.…

    • 5733 Words
    • 23 Pages
    Powerful Essays