The Black Paintings of Goya Part ll

Goya's Black Paintings are a series of fourteen murals with which Goya decorated the walls of his house, near Madrid. Goya moved into the so-called Quinta del Sordo, "The Villa of the Deaf Man" in 1819 in his seventy-third year, and remained there until, disgusted with Spanish politics, he moved to Bordeux in 1824, where he died in 1828.  Thirty-five years after his death, the paintings were given to the Prado Museum, where they have been on display ever since; unfortunately, they suffered considerable damage as they were transferred from wall to canvas. Goya composed these to meet his own expressive needs; he never intended that they be seen by the general public.  He never wrote about them, and, to my knowledge, never discussed them.  He didn't even give them titles--the titles by which they are known today are all posthumous inventions. This deepens the enigmas of these already enigmatic works.  They are subject to diverse interpretations; the interpretations in this article are largely my own.   Only 'largely" because I am indebted to Veleriano Bozals book, Pinturas negras de Goya, (Machado Libros, 2009) for some historical facts and interpretive details.  (To my knowledge, there is no English translation.)

I first became aware of these paintings during a trip to Madrid with my wife in May, 2015.  I stood before them transfixed for a long time.  I was fascinated most of all with El Perro, The Dog, the subject of the first of this series of two.  I was also deeply moved by three of the other Black Paintings, which will be discussed in this essay along with a brief recounting of my impressions of The Dog.

1. Saturn (Saturno)

At first glance, this is the most striking painting of the entire group.  The intensity of Saturn's expression and the depicted horror cannot fail to gain one's attention.  What is Goya trying to convey here?

In Greek mythology, Saturn was the son of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia, (Earth).  Upon reaching maturity, Saturn castrated and imprisoned his father, thus becoming the undisputed ruler of the universe. He married his sister Rhea and ruled over the Golden Age during which no laws were needed, since everyone behaved righteously.  His was a divine yet  dysfunctional family, however, savage  to a degree almost unimaginable among  mortals. A prophecy revealed that a son would depose him.  Rhea gave birth to five children.  In order to contravene the prophecy, Saturn devoured each child shortly after birth.  During her sixth pregnancy, the queen decided to trick her husband and save the sixth child.  After she gave birth to a son, she wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes, which, supposing that it was his son, Saturn promptly swallowed whole.  Rhea raised her surviving child in secret.  Upon reaching adulthood, the son overthrew and subsequently imprisoned Saturn. Before banning his father to Tartarus, the son forced him to swallow an emetic, after which he disgorged his previous five children.  (In order of their birth, mind you; the Greeks certainly had vivid imaginations.) The son, of course, was Zeus; his disgorged siblings were Demeter, Neptune, Hades, Hera and Hephaestus; one imagines that they were, that is, are, eternally grateful.

A wild myth, signifying the brutality of nature, (Saturn was, after all, the son of Earth and Sky), and the brutality of humans, especially when they are drunk on power and willing to continue drinking this intoxicant at all costs.

Goya's painting differs significantly from depictions of Saturn's cannibalism.   In order to illustrate this difference, we turn to a painting of the well-known myth, in this case "Saturn" by Peter Paul Rubens:

Rubens's is a more conventional version of the myth.  An old man--Saturn is also the god of old age, hence the adjective, "saturnine"--is depicted devouring an infant.  (The terrified child appears actually to be a few months old; his head is smaller than an infant's in proportion to his torso, much like an adult's; Rubens made these slight changes for expressive purposes.)

Now let's examine Goya's version.  Goya's victim is no infant.  The contours of the buttocks and hips indicate that this is a young female. (Why did Goya choose to paint a female victim?  Perhaps she represents the innocence of nature?  Perhaps she, a defenseless youth, is a metaphorical representation of how the powerful treat the powerless?)  Has Saturn already bitten her head and/or left shoulder with the terrible evidence of his deed covered by his long, unkempt hair?  Hard to tell. Blood flows down her shoulders; she appears limp, pale--most likely she is already dead.  Saturn is about to bite off her left arm. 

Observe his mouth: no teeth, no tongue, just a large inhuman black hole about to devour flesh in much the same way black holes in the cosmos devour stars that come too near.  Rubens's protagonist is inhuman by behavior but quite human in appearance; Goya's is a crazed demon, half human, half beast.

No, this monster is no god.  A furious, dangerous version of the harmless Tom O'Bedlam perhaps, but no god.  His long, unkempt hair, gaunt features and near-nakedness suggests that this is an old man deformed by ravages of homelessness and insanity.  And those eyes!  Such a mad expression reveals someone driven by internal demons with minimal contact with reality.  His lower limbs appear more beast-like than human.

One must not forget that Goya endured a serious illness in 1793-1794, which left him deaf.  Embittered by external horror and internal instabilities, Goya increasingly feared for his sanity.  The feeling of impending doom was especially acute during the time of the Black Paintings, (1819-1824). One gets the impression that the paranoid, mad expression of Saturn's features not only represent the deeds of inhumane humans, but the machinations of inner demons as well.

As mentioned in Part l,  most of the Black Paintings convey a sense of outraged humanity. For Goya, life is sacred.  That this innate sacredness has been so horribly abused is what gives paintings such as this one their power.  Depicting horror for the sake of horror is not a shade on Goya's inner palette.

Goya was painfully aware of the atrocities committed during The Peninsular War (1808-1814)--the French invaded Spain in 1808--and the corruption of the subsequent Bourbon restoration.  Reacting to the chaos and cruelty around him, Goya made a series of aquatint engravings entitled, Los Desastres de la Guerra, The Disasters of War, which include brutal scenes of carnage.  Examples: in one of them, a naked man, held upside down by soldiers, is being castrated by one of the soldiers; another depicts a man whose hands have been chopped off; another depicts a man, tied to a tree, who has been castrated.  (Recall that Saturn castrated his father; the instrument with which he did this is included in the far mid-left region of the Goya's painting.  I think that this is as much a reference to the brutality of Spanish history in Goya's day as it is to the Greek myth.)

In this painting, Saturn appears to rise from a black abyss like a crazed, unloving god of untrammeled egocentricity.  It suggests a parody of a portrait of the Good Shepherd or of St. Jerome in the desert.

I interpret this painting not only as an example of physical violence, but of other types of violence as well.  You don't have to be outwardly violent to commit acts of cruelty.  Example:  violence is committed against the poor by those in power, who have little concern for those at the bottom of society. A Senator can look spiffy and be dressed to the nines; inside, however, his inner Saturn is willing to do anything to maintain his privileged position.  Thus, the painting becomes an allegorical representation  of a twisted soul drunk on greed and power.

The Saturn in a three-piece suit is perhaps the most dangerous Saturn of all.

Implicit in Goya's outraged humanity is an important question:  Will Saturn, debased humanity, return to the abyss whence he arose? That is up to us.

2. Two Old Men (Dos Viejos)

We see here an unforgettable rendering of an old man with a very serious, inward-looking expression on his face.  He has the trappings of old age, namely a long, white beard, and the use of a cane for support.  He is dressed as a monk, but this, along with the white beard, is more indicative of wisdom than of belief.  This is not meant to be a Catholic icon.  The face reveals a deep intelligence, wisdom, and more than a trace of melancholy.  It is reasonable to assume that there are some elements of a self-portrait here--Goya was old, sick and wise at the time of its composition--but autobiographical elements are not the primary focus here.  Goya here as well as in the other paintings is after making valid statements regarding the human condition--heavily influenced, of course, by the weariness and pessimism of his inner life at the time.
Now let us turn to the other figure.  If this is a second monk, as some have postulated, the order he belongs to is surreal.   Goya took great pains to depict here a cousin of Saturn, that is, a beast-like, debased human.  Notice the hypertelorism, (widely spaced eyes), characteristic of animals for whom a panoramic vision is more important, in order to spot or flee from prey; this is in marked contrast to  the more highly evolved closer-set eyes that enable binocular vision in humans.  They look more reptilian than human.  The mouth--recall what was said earlier about Saturn's--is indicative, to me at least, of a fish's--a fish about to swallow the wise man's ear rather than to whisper something into it. There is something lascivious about that mouth as well.  The sexual depravity element is accentuated by the ears, which would seem more at home on a satyr than on a human.  The simian hands reinforce the beast-like nature of the "second monk."  Note also that only the wise man is portrayed in full, the beast-man appears as little more than a head, which gives a sense of incorporeality to his being.

What is Goya conveying here?  Once again, I see this painting as more of an allegory than a portrait of two individuals.  Being old and wise does not mean that one is free from temptation--terrible temptations, in this case, as we observe the second man's face.  I interpret this satyr to be the wise man's inner demon.  He seems to me to represent lust rather than anything else, but anyone of the Seven Deadly Sins will do.  It might even represent insanity, a malady which Goya, now old, ill, disillusioned and more intense than ever, very much feared.

"Friedlich und heiter ist dann das Alter," wrote Hölderlin, "Old age will be peaceful and calm."  Well, not always--it certainly wasn't for that German poet, who went insane not too long after having written this poem.

The following immortal lines from Yeats's "Sailing To Byzantium" are very applicable to our interpretation: "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing,/And louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress." The Goya-like old man of the portrait has a soul with hands that have done a lot of clapping and will most likely  continue to clap--but at the moment they are keeping time to the Weltschmerz of a Brahms symphony rather than to the joie de vivre of a Rossini overture.

Please now refer to the portrait in its entirety.  The wise man's head is bending away from his demon.  He is resisting temptation.  He will be successful at it as well, I assert, from the fact that his body remains erect.  He is like a tree the upper branches of which sway in the wind while the trunk remains firmly rooted in the ground.  His cane, I think, is not only representative of old age, but representative of a man in solid contact with the Earth. Serious temptations will continue to come--and go--to this old man; his soul will sing louder and louder, nevertheless.

3. El Perro (The Dog)

El Perro is the subject of Part l of this two-part series. (The article can be accessed on the internet by googling "El Perro Thomasdorsett" or on by blog.) I will therefore provide only a brief summary here.

This painting has been called, Un Perro Semihundito or A Partially Drowned Dog. Goya, as we stated before, didn't give titles to any of the Black Paintings.  "A Dog About To Go Under" would be more accurate.  The dog, about to disappear forever, a fact of which he is very much aware, looks  to the sky for his Master to come and save him.  The vast sky above the animal is an indication, in this interpretation, that not only is the cosmos vast, but impersonally vast.  There is no indication that the Master--God--will ever come to the faithful being who desperately hopes to be saved. Goya is perhaps telling us that hope for divine intervention is futile. The age of faith is over.  This is thus one of the first paintings of the modern era

4. Two Women and a Man (Dos Viejos y un Hombre)

We mentioned that the grisly Saturno painting evokes the greatest sense of horror of all the works in the series.  A careful look at this painting, however, reveals a scene that is no less disturbing

Once again we have both an allegory and a parody here.  The painting looks like a macabre version of a Flemish genre scene, which it mocks with its pessimistic Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of peasant life.  It is an allegory of both vulnerability and viciousness.

The man is not well dressed; this peasant is unkempt, perhaps a beggar. Now look closely at the man's face.  His eyes are closed; his mouth open.  He is completely self-absorbed; the external world, at least at this moment, does not exist for him  He is completely unaware of the two young women next to him.  Now look at his right arm.  He is masturbating.  His face indicates that he is at, or near, the moment of orgasm.

Such a severe disregard for social norms--not the masturbating, but the masturbating in public--indicates madness.  During intercourse between lovers, two individuals become ecstatically, albeit briefly, fused as one.  This man has nobody.  He is seeking a momentary respite from a painful existence.  Perhaps he is using self-stimulation as a drug to assuage overwhelming anxieties.  In any case, when the orgasm has passed, he will return to being destitute.  The first thing he will see is not the smile of a lover, but the malevolent grin on the face of a stranger.

George Herbert, the great English poet of the sixteenth century, wrote that he once felt troubled like a  man who had fallen into a ditch from which he could not get out by himself. Eventually God came down to his level, as it were, lent him a hand, and brought him back from his living grave.  Such a spiritual experience as Herbert's is rare among humans of his intellectual stature these days.

Simone Weil, the great--perhaps half-mad--philosopher who died young during the Second World War, was a believer, but a rather pessimistic one.  She did not expect God to lift people out of the ditches of their misery, for God has withdrawn from the world--at least for now.   She wrote that the only way to save an injured man who has fallen into a deep ditch is for one to go down to the same level as the man who had fallen.  ( I imagine him fastening a rope under the victim's shoulder, returning to the surface via the same rope, which  he had previously secured to a tree, and then hauling  the injured man to freedom.) Help must come, if it comes at all, from the God within, as it were, and not from without.  An intervention to save someone as lost as the mad peasant in Goya's painting entails great sacrifice.  The "savior" would need to abandon his own milieu, his own comfort, descend to the level of the fallen one, suffer along with him and then do his best to see to it that they return to the world together.

The chance of this happening is more likely to occur than the possibility of the Master ever coming to save El Perro, true, yet it almost never happens.  We tend to befriend those of the same age, race, ethnicity  and educational level.  Few are willing to sacrifice their own comfort for a beggar in a ditch.  Sure, some good people might help him, but to a limited degree.  Sooner or later, the mad beggar would once more be on his own, like the mentally ill who were released--and subsequently abandoned--when, decades ago, it was decided that hospitals for the mentally ill should be closed. After all, each has his own troubles!  That however is no excuse for disobeying the great commandment of loving one's neighbor as oneself.

It is, as in this painting, even worse than that.  The vulnerable who need more care than the rest of us are much more likely to be beaten, mocked and humiliated.  The girl with the evil grin knows what he is doing and laughs at the weird man's behavior--the diversion which mockery provides will briefly enable her to forget her own problems.  "I might have it bad," I imagine her telling herself, "but at least I'm not some crazy nobody like him!"

I have obviously made a riff on the theme of this paining, other interpretations are possible.  I am convinced, however, that the painting reveals  a hard truth.  As Jesus of Nazareth said, those with little, even the little they have will be taken away from them.  No doubt about it, many vulnerable  people enjoy kicking people who are even more vulnerable into a ditch.  The rest of us hardly notice, step around an inconvenience, and go right on our way.

                                                            *

I have presented four highly personal responses to four of the Black Paintings, the seminal series of works of art Goya composed late in his life without any concern for public acceptance or for the tastes of his time.  They are revolutionary in both form and content; I have concentrated on the latter.  Not being an art historian has perhaps some advantages--what you've read here you will not find anywhere else.  For whom have I written this article?   My ideal reader, hopefully you,  is someone whose sense of outraged humanity and whose love of great art has found something of value in this brief analysis of four masterpieces, written by a fellow human being who shares both of those characteristics as well.  

The Black Paintings of Goya, Part 1: El Perro (The Dog)

1. Introduction

My wife and I spent a month in Madrid this summer.  We studied Spanish at a language school; included in the program were several tours, one of them a visit to the Prado.  The guide, the director of the school, knows his art and frequently gives tours to young, adolescent Spanish students.  In our group, the members of which were all of retirement age, the knowledge of Spanish varied.  The guide was apparently saying the same things he said to the Spanish kids. This, combined with with fact that he had to speak very slowly and clearly made us feel like kids again, and not very bright ones at that.  It was a delight.  He gave us a good analysis of the works of El Greco and Velasquez, including the latter's famous Las Meninas.  There was much more to be seen, so we returned a few days later.

I headed straight for the Goyas. All of them were first-rate; his last compositions, however, were especially fascinating. I knew very little about these so-called black paintings except that they were world-famous.  All of them, originally painted as murals onto the walls of Goya's villa, had been transferred onto canvas and fill an entire room at the museum.  I was intrigued by these grotesque pictures of a world full of greed, debased by a rampant lust for power and distorted by a near-total lack of love.  The modern world?  Exaggerated perhaps, but these extraordinary paintings are, unfortunately,  a lot closer to the truth than works by, say, Renoir. They affected me deeply, as they have affected many in much the same way.  The reaction I had to one of them, however, was much more intense; it moved me to the quick.

At the back wall was a painting, El Perro, The Dog, the only one of the black paintings that isn't depicted using somber tones; the dominant color is a fiery ochre.  Utterly amazed,  I stood before it, boca abierta, for a long time. 

This is the first modern painting, I said to myself.  It marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.  Just as a wall of fire ensured that Adam and Eve could never return to Eden, the fiery ochre of this painting assures that no one can return to previous ages of belief without sacrificing intellect.   It is, in my opinion, a tremendously important painting; why I'm convinced this is so is the subject of this essay.

First a few words about the painter. I will be brief and emphasize only information that is helpful for the understanding of this essay; a wealth of information about Goya  can be found by any interested person in a library or online. Francisco Goya (1746-1828) deservedly ranks among the very best artists Spain has produced.  He began his career closely connected to Spanish royalty on whose patronage he depended.  Royal commissions continued into the 1800s, but something had changed.  In 1793-1794 Goya suffered a serious illness, the exact nature of which is unknown.  He became deaf and lost his sense of balance; voices and sounds in his head drove him to the brink of insanity.  After his recovery, his vision darkened.  It's as if Goya began his career as Bob Hope and ended it as George Carlin.  He did not eschew the fantastic or the macabre, but never was grotesque merely to shock: an outraged humanity underlies the best works of his maturity, even when, or especially when, his imagination took flight well beyond the conventions of the early nineteenth century. The last of the old masters and the first of the modern, Goya's work sometimes soars and sometimes dives deep.  It reminds me of the saying of a Hasidic rabbi of the nineteenth century: The middle of the road is for horses.

Some of the more famous works of his later period include Charles IV and His Family from 1800, a biting satirical portrait of the corrupt royal family--did they remain unaware of the striking "lack of visual diplomacy" in this work which they had commissioned? His later works include the very disturbing Disasters of War and Los Caprichos which depict, in Goya's own words, "The innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual."  One of the most important compositions of his maturity is the iconic The Third of May 1808, completed in 1814; this portrayal of Spanish peasants being slaughtered by Polish troops under French command is perhaps the greatest anti-war painting ever painted.  

The savagery of the Peninsular War (1807-1814) waged by the French; the dashing of hopes for a more liberal society after the Bourbon restoration, the suppressive nature of which had a grand ally in the Catholic Church, turned Goya into one of the most biting, bitterest and most astute artists of all time.

In 1814, at the age of 75, Goya retired to a villa near Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo (House of The Deaf Man--named after the previous owner, not after Goya, who was deaf as well.)  Despair over the current state of Europe, combined with declining mental and physical health, led him to withdraw from society.  His artistry however, if anything, deepened.  He painted onto the walls of the villa fourteen murals, the so-called black paintings, which were never meant to be shown publicly.  In fact, he wrote no notes regarding these paintings, leading to very diverse interpretations. The works depict a macabre world of runaway greed, lust for power and the utter  lack of love.  The only exception to this artistic stance among the black paintings is El Perro, a work which we will now discuss. (The black paintings were transferred to canvas fifty years after Goya's death; this process resulted in some loss of detail and in some distortions.)

2. El Perro

Why do I consider this painting the first modern painting?--By the way, I am apparently not alone in this view; I read later that other critics have had a similar opinion.  Some have noted its striking originality--without the dog's head, the work is perhaps the first abstract painting ever; with the dog's head one clearly sees that this composition paved the way to surrealism as well.  It is the "message" of this painting, however, that makes it modern, a watershed in the history of art. This essay will focus on its thematic content, namely, the absurdity of expecting divine intervention to alleviate suffering and to resolve the predicament of existence.

Critics have written that El Perro is the most enigmatic and problematic of all of the fourteen black paintings.  To me, its message is clear. We see a dog's head; his body is buried or at least hidden by a terrain that curves upward.  (This upward movement which underscores the movement of the dog's head is an element from classical composition.)  Some have imagined that the dog is drowning in quicksand and is about to go under.  Goya gave no corroboration of this.  However, it is obvious that the poor creature is about to disappear.  The terrain is completely devoid of any additional sign of life; the dog is completely alone in a desert-like environment.  The doomed animal looks expectantly upwards for help from above.  The painting, in its austere depiction of a wasteland that presumably extends beyond the canvas in all directions, indicates strongly that no help will arrive.  The dog will soon be gone forever. It is a stark and honest representation of the human condition.  It reminds me of the title of a powerful German novel, Jeder stirbt für sich allein--Everyone dies alone.

This painting reflects a turning point in human history. For thousands of years, the belief was widespread in the Western world, among intellectuals and everyone else, that human destiny, both in a collective and in a personal sense,  was in the control of a personal God.  The Enlightenment, which undermined this view, lasted from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century; this seminal period came to an end just before Goya painted El Perro.  Before the Enlightenment it was acceptable that a man of Augustine's, of Maimonides's or of Aquinas's intellect would be a theologian or at least a devout believer, as all these men were; after the Enlightenment, persons of equivalent stature would much more likely be scientists or secular philosophers.  Galileo challenged the religious mindset with his emphasis on science and the necessity of examining everything through the alembics of reason; the Church and all forms of religious literalism have been in retreat ever since.  Modern Europe is not only post-Christian, it is, with the exception of many yet-to-be assimilated immigrants, post-God. Theology, once thought to be the queen of all categories of knowledge, is now a homeless beggar.

Prehistorical humans were not able to differentiate between what lay within and what lay without.  Personality, then and now, was very strongly felt and was projected automatically onto natural phenomena.  Nothing was impersonal; the gods were behind lightning, thunder, rain and the wind.  The personification of elements of nature was experienced so strongly that religion, the belief that there was a deity behind the phenomenal world,  remained unchallenged for centuries--until the scientific method called it into question.  Literal religious belief is now more or less restricted to the less educated.  We can accept Augustine's literal interpretation of the Old Testament, which was not an absurd position for an intellect of his era; any educated person, trained in the scientific method, who takes such a position today strikes one as being quaint or perhaps even crazy. A symbolic understanding of religious myths, is, of course, another matter.

3, El Perro's Expression

Goya painted the dog, which obviously represents humankind, with human features.  There is no parody here; Goya's compassion for the dog's predicament is evident.  We think of dogs as devoted creatures, "faithful dogs," and as not very bright creatures as well, "dumb dogs." I am confident that Goya intended the viewer to be aware of both of these aspects.  He found it perhaps both moving, sad and inevitable that human beings would still look to the skies for an answer--a doomed-to-fail quest that would continue its windmill-chasing until the truths of science became incorporated in the minds of the general populace. (Which hasn't fully happened yet!) We know of many anecdotes of dogs lying on their masters' graves, expecting their loved ones to somehow return.  The chances of their returning are the same as that of the Master, who in fact never existed, coming down from the sky to save el perro from annihilation.

Before I present a close-up of el perro's expression, I would like to say a few words about how imminent death was depicted in the past.  Critics have said that there is no true tragedy in Christian art, since death, especially martyrdom, was viewed merely as a passage from pain to paradise.  Look at the expressions of the saints about to be slaughtered in this typical painting, (Correggio, 1489-1534, The Martyrdom of Four Saints.) They are looking up to heaven, much as el perro does, but with a beatific expression on their faces; they are convinced they are about to receive an ecstatic, eternal reward.  Pious Germans would call these cliched expressions of anticipated delight "selig" or "holy;" the English cognate is, you guessed it, "silly."

The Ancient Greeks were different.  (Pictured below is a detail from the sculpture, Laocoon and His Sons, attributed to Agesander of Rhodes; it is located in the Vatican Museum.)  Observe the face of Laocoon while being suffocated by serpents along with his two sons:

No silly/selig expression here; this is a depiction of raw suffering.  Nobody is going to save Laocoon, and he knows it.

Now let us turn our attention to el perro's face.

How subtle this simple portrait is!  The dog faces imminent death like the Christian saints; unlike them, however, this dog has his doubts.  His ears are cocked, ready to turn to the slightest sound from above.  His eyes are wide-open and staring fixedly at the spot where he hopes his Master will finally arrive.  The intensity of his stance is quite striking.  He is not suffering physically like Laocoon--if he were in quicksand, one would think there would be signs of struggle; el perro seems to have given up struggling altogether. He completely lacks the faith of the Christian martyrs in things unseen; for him, seeing is believing.  The dog hasn't seen God yet; the viewer, who sees the whole picture, knows he never will.  The dog's unanswered quest for redemption arises from his desperate situation: in better times this human dog, unlike the saints, would have most likely turned his attention to mundane things.

Goya's message is clear.  First, we poor mortal dogs deserve compassion.  Second, we who see the whole picture know that it is a waste of time to seek solace from an imaginary friend.  From now on, Goya seems to be telling us, genuine consolation can only come from one's fellow humans, one's nature, one's wisdom, one's friends. The modern era has begun.

4. El Perro's cosmos

This is not the cosmos of Christmas carols.  It is vaster; it is impersonal; it is scientific.  Previously in paintings, the sky merely framed the more important human activity taking place below.  If the sky took up more space, it was usually filled with mythical creatures or defined by flocks of birds.  Here the sky takes full stage--and the stage is empty.  Sky extends about seventy-five percent of the way down the right margin; on the left, it extends much further than that.  This is perhaps the first painting that clearly illustrates that human beings are not the center of the universe--space is both the center and the periphery. This is not a humanized sky; there are no clouds, no stars, no moon, no birds.  It looks to me rather like an anticipation, by a century and a half, of an image of the cosmic background radiation, a representation of the cosmos when it was composed completely of radiation. It is the polar opposite of the traditional Christian view, as expressed in a Gospel tune as follows:

Farther along we will see Jesus
come from his mansion up in the sky...

The mythological world, even if believed in literally, was always experienced as something immediate, since it exists (only) inside; one always has immediate access to one's own inner life.  The real world, as depicted by physics, is a good deal more remote and abstract.  The traditional cosmos was already undermined by Goya's time.  The speed of light was discovered in the seventeenth century.  The concept of a heliocentric universe died with Galileo.  Kant and others envisioned a universe of truly immense proportions which was constantly being recycled.  Human beings were no longer at the center of the universe; God was no longer above it.

I find significance in the colors of the painting as well.  They are all related.  The ground looks a bit like a solidification of the sky; the dog looks like something in between, an interrelationship that has both scientific and spiritual validity.  

The dog is lost in the cosmic vastness, but he doesn't quite know it.  His severely tested faith still hopes that the universe will address him personally.  But the viewer knows better.  He realizes that there are no borders to the painting and that the landscape and skyscape will continue in the same way on all sides, just as space continues in the same way on all sides, if not forever, than at least for unimaginably long stretches.  Although the dog desperately refuses to believe it, there is nothing special about his location.  A yawning, infinite indifference surrounds him.

4. El Perro's Consolation

He doesn't see it, but we do.

What would Goya's painting be without the head of the dog? An abstract, amateur painting without anything to hold the viewer's attention.  Even though the head is tiny and not at the center of the painting, it is indeed the most important part of the composition.

It is important to note that only the head is visible, the seat of the brain, the seat of the greatest unknown/known natural wonder, consciousness.  Here Goya illustrates not only the fragility of humanity, but its glory as well.  It is astounding that the vast universe fits, as it were, inside the human skull.  We can describe the cosmos in great detail via the "miracle" of language; we can delve even deeper via the "miracle" of mathematics.  That human beings who have evolved on a tiny speck of land are able, via these two languages, to obtain an understanding of the vast whole is, well, beyond amazement.

We moderns have an even greater appreciation for that little dog.  As modern physics asserts, the role of consciousness is fundamental to reality.  It plays an essential, well demonstrated yet inexplicable role in determining quantum realities--and quantum realities are the foundation of everything we perceive.  Consciousness is everything, as the great mathematician, John von Neumann wrote.  

One of the wildest theories- wilder than any mythology religion has ever produced--is the so-called Top Down Cosmology theory proposed by Stephen Hawking.  I will briefly summarize it.  Before the Big Bang everything "existed" in a quantum state; there were many possibilities, each of which able to  become a reality.  It is our consciousness that chose the quantum state that has become our world.  In other words, consciousness not only creates the present, but also created the past!  This theory certainly isn't proven, but it gives one a good idea of the primacy of consciousness asserted by many physicists today.

The old question about whether sound occurs when a tree falls without a listener in earshot has been rendered obsolete.  It is the brain that interprets vibrations of certain frequencies as sound; without a brain there is no sound.  If it is true that consciousness creates everything, there aren't even disturbances in the air without the brain.

This also gives new life to an albeit nontraditional view of religion.  God--a metaphor just as the individual self is a metaphor--exists within.  If, as some physicists assert, in accord with Hinduism, that consciousness is fundamental to everything, inside and outside become interchangeable.  If God exists within and inside is outside, well then, an impersonal God exists in a certain sense in the outside world as well.  A caveat here: consciousness may indeed be the creator of everything, but its determinations of reality have nothing to do with human volition.  The choice of what becomes reality is always an impersonal one. 

It is admittedly sad that everything in life  must be paid for.  The mind might seem immortal, but the body that gives rise to it, much as a radio enables one to hear music, is not.  This duality constitutes the glory and tragedy of mankind, so subtly demonstrated by Goya's little masterpiece.

5. The Poem

El Perro

Between quicksand earth and a blind, ochre sky,
I look and find no one to take me home;
I am alone.  I wish there were a leash.

I wrote this little poem on the night after I first experienced the painting, several hours earlier.  It is human to want a cosmic connection, even if it is via a leash wielded by a tyrant, benevolent in some aspects, but a tyrant nevertheless.  Goya, as mentioned previously, paints a representation of this desire with  great sympathy, but his message is clear: from now on, searching for a personal God in the cosmos is beneath human dignity.  We are to walk upright, facing the world as it is, making it our own by the transcendent, invisible bonds of wisdom and love; leashes are for dogs.




Summary

El Perro, the first modern painting, which reveals so much so economically, is a true masterpiece; its innovative technique, and, perhaps more important, its seminal content, give little El Perro a substantive place in the history of art.