Featured White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
The expressive body in Goya's Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 1998 by Andrew Schulz
I intend to argue that the significance of Silva's analysis lies not in its validity as a "correct" or definitive interpretation, but rather in the conceptual tools that he brings to bear on the image. Written by a member of the artistic establishment during an important juncture in the development of aesthetic thought in Spain, his oration provides a glimpse of the expectations that "los inteligentes" would have had for such a painting, in terms of both the techniques employed by the artist to create it and the methods by which the viewer was imagined to decode its meaning.(14) In particular, two related issues that Silva addresses in examining the work - the expressive character of the human figure and the nature of artistic imitation - were widely discussed in the orations delivered at the prize-giving ceremonies of the royal academies in Madrid and Valencia, as well as in aesthetic treatises written during the final two decades of the eighteenth century. Silva's attention to the semiotics of the body in Goya's painting will provide a lens through which to consider important changes that took place in progressive aesthetic thought in Spain in the final years of the century. These developments, in which Silva played an important role, revolve around a shift from the classicizing idealism advocated by Anton Raphael Mengs and his Spanish followers toward a more naturalistic approach to the making of art.
Expression and imitation are not simply conceptual categories that a contemporary commentator - or a late twentieth-century art historian - can bring to bear on this painting. Rather, these issues will be seen to have informed Goya's practice as an artist during the 1780s and 1790s. His involvement in the affairs of the Royal Academy of S. Fernando in Madrid, which he served as assistant director of painting from 1785 until 1795 and then as director of painting until 1797, suggest that he would have been familiar with the aesthetic developments and debates taking place within that institution.(15) Careful examination of the religious paintings and tapestry cartoons that Goya executed during this period will reveal a conscious and evolving engagement with the semantic potential of the human figure that reflects ideas being articulated by the advisers to the academies in Madrid and Valencia. Moreover, by examining Goya's output of these years in terms of expression and imitation, I hope to indicate that his religious works and tapestry cartoons, two aspects of his production that have been treated separately in the literature, are animated by a common set of pictorial concerns. Finally, this investigation of the semiotics of the figure should be considered in relation to recent analyses of the representation of the body in French painting of the same period. In particular, the art of Jacques-Louis David and his pupils has been the subject of several important studies that have centered on the depiction of the human figure.(16) Although the artistic (not to mention the political) circumstances are quite different in late eighteenth-century Spain, it is revealing to examine Goya's painting as an important episode in the rethinking of Neoclassical attitudes toward human form that takes place in a variety of contexts at the end of the eighteenth century.
