The expressive body in Goya's Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent

Everyone is aware that the delirios of Bosch (who is celebrated for having arrived at the extreme of disorder in his imagination) consist of a joining of figures composed from the most dissonant and strange parts, but such that each part is in itself an accurate copy of some material object that we see everyday.(91)

Similar estimations of Bosch and his art appeared during subsequent years. A prominent example is the publication of Felipe de Guevara's sixteenth-century manuscript Comentarios de la pintura, which appeared for the first time in 1788 in an edition edited by Antonio Ponz, secretary of the Madrid academy. This text contains a passage on Bosch that argues the same position found in Silva's address, as Guevara insists that the Flemish artist, unlike some of his followers, always remained within the limits of nature, painting "things that were strange but natural."(92)

In summary, Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent represents a dual shift in Goya's art, toward both the natural and the fantastic. At the same time, the figure of the saint indicates the continued influence of the Mengsian principle of ideal beauty. The painting, then, possesses a polyphonic quality that encourages us to consider it as a meditation - surely unconscious and unintentional - on the nature of artistic imitation.(93) It may be that Goya's personal relationship with the Osunas allowed him the freedom to experiment. In any event, this canvas marks an important crossroads in Goya's artistic development. In the uncommissioned work that he would begin to execute in the mid-1790s, starting with the Yard with Lunatics and particularly in the Caprichos, the search for ideal beauty falls away and the dichotomy between naturalism and fantasy becomes a central concern, as it would continue to be for the remainder of Goya's life. More broadly (and speculatively), one might argue that in bringing together these three competing conceptions of imitation, Goya's image presents in microcosmic form a set of conflicts - between classicism and realism, between realism and the imaginary - that would play themselves out in European art over the course of the next century.

Notes

Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

1. Robert Rosenblum, Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), 50.

2. Among the many scholars who have discussed this painting in terms of the emergence of the demonic creatures are Aureliano de Beruete y Moret, Goya, composiciones y figuras (Madrid: Blass y Cia, 1917), 34; F. J. Sanchez Canton, "Goya pintor religioso," Revista de Ideas Esteticas 4 (1946): 294; Folke Nordstrom, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the Art of Goya (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiskell, 1962), 72-73; Gassier and Wilson, 96; Fred Licht, Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art (New York: Universe Books, 1979), 55; John Moffitt, "Goya y los demonios: El autorretrato con el doctor Arrieta y la tradicion del 'ars moriendi,'" Goya 163 (1981): 13; Heckes, 6-33; and Sarah Symmons, Goya in Pursuit of Patronage (London: Gordon Fraser, 1988), 54-55. For this interpretation in more widely disseminated texts, see Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 256; and Priscilla Muller, in The Dictionary of Art, vol. 13, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove's Dictionaries, 1996), 242.