Art Contemplation- In Goya's Greatest Scenes

Written by Trevor Malkinson

Today's art contemplation offering is The Third of May, 1808 by the Spanish painter Fransisco Goya (1746-1828). The scene depicts some of the events and disappointments of the modern revolutionary age. H.W. Janson, in History of Art, writes this about the painting:

"When Napoleon's armies occupied Spain, in 1808, Goya and many other Spaniards hoped that the conquerors would bring the liberal reforms so badly needed. The barbaric behavior of the French troops crushed these hopes and generated a popular resistance of equal savagery. Many of Goya's works from 1810 to 1815 reflect this bitter experience...The picture has all the emotional intensity of religious art, but these martyrs are dying for Liberty, not the Kingdom of Heaven. Nor are their executioners the agents of Satan but of political tyranny: a formation of faceless automatons, impervious to their victims' despair and defiance. The same scene was to be reenacted countless times in modern history. With the clairvoyance of genius, Goya created an image that has become a terrifying symbol of our era".

Shootings_on_Third_of_May_1808_Francisco_de_Goya

In 1957 the American Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote one of his most well known poems, In Goya's Greatest Scenes, about his own contemplation of Goya's paintings. This is the poem in full below:

In Goya’s Greatest Scenes

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see

the people of the world

exactly at the moment when

they first attained the title of

"suffering humanity"

They writhe upon the page

in a veritable rage

of adversity

Heaped up

groaning with babies and bayonets

under cement skies

in an abstract landscape of blasted trees

bent statues bats wings and beaks

slippery gibbets

cadavers and carnivorous cocks

and all the final hollering monsters

of the

"imagination of disaster"

they are so bloody real

it is as if they really still existed

And they do

Only the landscape is changed

They still are ranged along the roads

plagued by legionnaires

false windmills and demented roosters

They are the same people

only further from home

on freeways fifty lanes wide

on a concrete continent

spaced with bland billboards

illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

The scene shows fewer tumbrils

but more maimed citizens

in painted cars

and they have strange license plates

and engines

that devour America

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Comment Link Saturday, 18 December 2010 00:25 posted by Trevor Malkinson
Found another passage on this painting by art historian Sir Kenneth Clark with a similar analysis:

"The freedoms won by revolution had been immediately lost either by counter-revolution or by the revolutionary government falling into the hands of military dictators. In Goya's picture of a firing squad, called 3 May 1808, the repeated gesture of those who had raised their arms in heroic affirmation becomes the repeated line of the soldiers' muskets as they liquidate a small group of inconvenient citizens. Well, we are used to this all now. We are almost numbed by repeated disappointments. But in 1810 it was a new discovery, and all the poets, philosophers and artists of the Romantic movements were shattered by it" (p.307).

You can still here the echoes of that disappointment in the words of Ferlinghetti. As the Romantic movement influenced and generated so much of the character of the postmodern mind/zeitgeist, it makes me wonder how much this disappointment, this "shattering" as Clark puts it, is still alive within us today, and how much evolutionary energy is being held back by this kind of (unconscious?)"numbing".