Bog Myrtle & Peat

There’s a painting by Francisco de Goya at the Real Monasterio de Santa María de Guadaloupe. It shows a dark, indoor glimpse of a man who stands slightly off-centre as lamplight lances in from his right. He’s wearing a hessian sack across his upper body, but his legs are bare and the wrist of one hand reaches down towards a contraption of shackles and thongs which bind his ankles together. The painting is small and the palette is a dirty, contradictory hash of chocolate, tobacco and cream. 

This image cuts an oddly secular shape in the little gallery which opens onto the mudéjar cloister. It’s surrounded by heavy, religious oils and carvings, and there’s nothing to explain its presence here in a place so clearly devoted to the expression of Faith. Perhaps you could talk your way into understanding the link by working on themes of Christ-like isolation and privation, but these connections feel more tenuous as other bodies begin to appear in the gloom behind the shackled figure. There’s a person lying on the slabbed floor in the foetal position with his back to the viewer. He’s sleeping or filled with the heaviest despair. There’s also a jug of water and two people conferring in whispers against a far wall. Perhaps one is a priest and the other is making confession, but there is a rapt intensity to their engagement which feels jarring because their private moment is being transacted within earshot of others. There’s no space – these men have not chosen this intimacy, and the scene is clearly “prison” or “jailhouse”. 

In other Goya paintings of prisons and lunatic asylums, the back-shadows contain all manner of dark perversities and violence in the most ambiguous twist of a brushstroke; the back of a man’s head working at another man’s groin – an inexplicable grin which rises towards maniacal laughter. The painting at Guadaloupe is simpler but the memory of other complexities endures, and it doesn’t matter much to me that this image is only atribuída a Goya. It’s near enough, and even if it’s only a forgery or a close imitation of the real thing, it seems suddenly strange that we should devalue these intensities because they were made by more than one artist. As the tourguide shouts for the hundredth time that you aren’t allowed to take photographs, I realise that I have no interest in taking one here anyway.

We only know the most basic things about Goya’s life. Historians can provide an approximate biography and a list of his friends and contacts, but there are hundreds of questionmarks over later work which took him off piste into a wonderland of fantasy and nightmare. Those heaped uncertainties mean that his work is extremely accessible – there’s no need to memorise dates and chronologies, or to place him in a sequence of artists who explored complex, evolving ideas. Most of what’s known is disputed, and his work exists in a swell of self-encapsulated confidence. As a result, we’re free to ignore the technical details and think instead about how the paintings make us feel. It’s quite possible to have no interest in art and still love Goya – even a brief, glancing encounter with his work is enough to provoke cascades of reaction.

The jailhouse scene at Guadaloupe is cold and disturbing. We’re being deliberately steered towards something, but it’s only open-ended – and if you think the key to this painting is the brightness and contrast of the sackcloth and the curl of a nostril, your guess is as good as mine. But this queasy lack of ready truth has aligned with several explorations I’ve made around the figure of the man himself, not in a search to know more, but rather to circle and relish the unknowns. 

Julia Blackburn’s semi-biography Old Man Goya is at its best when she recognises the gaps and guesses around them. When she tries to imagine the profound deafness which defined Goya’s later life, some of her thought-experiments are cringingly clumsy – but they make space to imagine his growing interiority, vulnerability and loneliness. We don’t know what he went through or how he experienced it; the best we can do is provide a jumping-off point to imagine how you might feel in the same circumstances. And as she presents a feverdream of tall inquisitionist hoods, dwarves and trees tortured into the shape of a crucifix, you could begin to call it pastiche – but every one of her images is striking in its eerie fogginess. It’s a very imprecise book, but that lack of clarity and precision is devastating. In the same way, Julian Rathbone’s mock-picaresque novel Joseph is a crazily overrated canter through the early stages of the peninsular war. I really dislike this book, but Rathbone’s Goya is terrifyingly present in the absences; the flight of witches above the rooftops of Salamanca and the twisted grin of gypsies and majas.

Without a plumbline or a concrete foundation to mark anything more than the simplest points of certainty, Goya often seems to lean out of eighteenth century Spain like a wraith. But when you and I react with unease or disturbance to his paintings, we’re catching the distant, unintelligible whispering of his voice – and it’s enough to confirm that it wasn’t all a dream.