Monarchy capricho biography books
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Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (–) is regarded as the most important Spanish artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over the course of his long career, Goya moved from jolly and lättsam to deeply pessimistic and searching in his paintings, drawings, etchings, and frescoes. Born in Fuendetodos, he later moved with his parents to Zaragoza and, at age fourteen, began studying with the painter José Luzán Martínez (–). In , the year of Goya’s birth, the Spanish crown was under the rule of Ferdinand VI. Subsequently, the Bourbon king Charles III (r. –88) ruled the country as an enlightened monarch sympathetic to change, employing ministers who supported radical economic, industrial, and agricultural reform. Goya came to artistic maturity during this age of enlightenment. In Madrid, the painter brothers Francisco (–) and Ramón Bayeu y Subías (–) had set up shop in , and Goya soon joined their studio, eventually marrying their sister Josefa. He visited Italy
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"Robert Hughes's dazzling new study of Goya not only conveys the range and prescience of the artist's work with enormous acuity and verve, but also conjures the world of 18th- and early 19th-century Spain with levande, pictorial ardor.
Writing in fierce, tactile prose, Mr. Hughes jolts the reader into a visceral appreciation of Goya's art.
–Michiko Kakutani, NewY orkTimes
"[Goya] is all you could ask for and more. Sturdy in its organisation, its interpretations, its common sense, it nevertheless fizzes with insights and hops with enthusiasm. There is not a dull sentence Hughes has found his ideal subject."
–Sebastian Smee, The Spectator
"Hughes has succeeded triumphantly. He has written an förebildlig work on an extraordinarily difficult subject: eloquent, scholarly, thorough, full of insight."
–Martin Gayford, London Telegraph
"The prolific Hughes offers a refreshing take on this great artist, about whom so much has been written. His powerful intelligence and eloquence make this a boo
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‘Teeming with Things Unknown’
The art of Francisco Goya has stood as a beacon over the cultural landscape during the nearly two centuries since his death, at age eighty-two, in It is a source of light that glares. We think of the terrible dazzle on the shirt of the laborer in Goya’s vast canvas The Third of May —the sure target for the squad lined up to shoot him. We think how the bright bodies of Goya’s Majas, both naked and clothed, pulse out their summons to lust as if lit from within. Witches, mules, and mutants jump up, abrupt islands of whiteness, from the dusky aquatint textures of the Caprichos: and when, in some of the Desastres de la guerra, the sheet is almost shadowless, we confront the hardest, harshest sunlight that ever shone. For Goya, to portray is emphatically to illuminate. The courtiers surge into view in pastings of lead-white paint—the glow of cheeks and collars, the shimmer of sashes and muslin, the brilliance of buttons. F