The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Francisco Goya · one of the Black Paintings · oil on plaster, transferred to canvas · one upright field: a naked giant crouched out of a black ground, his eyes wide, gripping a headless body in both hands, its arm at his mouth · about 1.4 by 0.8 metres · painted about 1819 to 1823 on a wall of Goya’s house across the Manzanares, taken off the wall and put on canvas in the 1870s · Museo del Prado, Madrid, since 1881 · the unit scored is this one picture as it now stands, on canvas; the wall and the room it was painted for are lost, and the other paintings of the house are context
Mode
Mythological painting stripped of decorum; a mural of private dread, one of the Black Paintings, now a canvas in a gallery
Mythos
Kronos, warned that a son will overthrow him, eating his children as they are born; Saturn as Time, which consumes what it makes; the old eating the young
Phase
One instant of the act, the body already headless; painted about 1819 to 1823 on a wall of the house across the Manzanares, put on canvas in the 1870s
Presentation
Oil on plaster, transferred to canvas, about 1.4 by 0.8 metres, upright; one figure and one partial body on a black ground, with no setting, no ground line and no light source, cropped at the knees
Register
Terror at one temperature: grey and ochre flesh, red only at the wound and the mouth, the whites of the eyes against black
Scale
One god, one body, one act, on a field about 1.4 metres high
Governing Proposition
A naked giant crouches out of a black ground, too large for the field, and grips a headless body in both hands, its arm already in his mouth. His eyes are wide, and they look past what his hands are doing. The wager of the picture is that the old myth of the father who eats his children can be painted from inside the eater: that power which consumes its own future does so in terror of being replaced, and takes no pleasure in it, and that dragged grey paint, a black with no floor and a crop that presses the god against both edges can say so without a word, on the wall of a house whose paintings no public saw in the painter’s lifetime.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1819 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, born in 1746 and by then deaf, bought a house outside Madrid, across the Manzanares, that was later called the Quinta del Sordo. Between about 1819 and 1823 he painted on the plaster walls of its rooms, directly, in oil, the pictures now called the Black Paintings, fourteen in the usual count. He left no word on them. No programme for the cycle is documented, no patron asked for them, and nothing shows that any of them was meant to be sold or shown.
In 1824 he left Spain for Bordeaux, and he died there in 1828. Nobody saw the paintings in public in his lifetime. The titles they carry are not his. The one scored here is called Saturn, or Saturn Devouring His Son, and it is scored alone: the other paintings of the house, and the room it was painted for, are its context. That the room is lost is a fact about what survives, and it is weighed there, under The Imperishable, and nowhere else.
The field is upright, about 1.4 metres high and 0.8 wide, nearly twice as tall as it is broad. Out of a black ground a naked, grey-haired giant crouches, his eyes wide and his mouth open on the bloody stump of an arm. In both hands he grips a headless human body. There is one figure and one partial body; there is no setting, no ground line and no light source. The head is pressed against the top edge, and the lower edge cuts the figure at the knees. The palette is a near-black ground, grey and ochre flesh, red at the wound and the mouth, and the whites of the eyes.
Movement II
The eyes are the first thing seen and the last. They are wide and white-rimmed, two whites with two dark points in them, and they do not look at what the hands are doing. They look past it. Take them away and the picture is an ogre at a meal; with them, the one who eats is afraid. That is the whole turn of the image, and it is made with almost nothing: a few touches of white in a grey head at the top of a black field.
The hands grip the body at the waist so hard that the fingers sink into its back, and the grip is the compulsion: he cannot let go of what he is doing. The body is pale and small against him, headless and armless, already mostly gone. The black gives the figure nowhere to be but the act. The crop is compelled with the rest: pressed against the top edge and cut off at the knees, the god is too large for the field, as he is for the world. Little yields to the test of what could be removed: the knees and lower legs are summary, and the dark at the left of the field is not needed.
What the eyes disclose can be stated. The one who devours his children is not a tyrant at ease; he is terrified, and the terror drives the crime. Power that eats its own future does so for fear of being replaced, and the act gives it no pleasure. The picture says this through image alone, and no viewer needs the myth’s name to read it. Much of what it gives is still dread, a state rather than a meaning, and its best known social reading, Spain under Ferdinand VII as a nation devouring its sons, is brought to the picture by its viewers rather than compelled by it.
Movement III
The myth is old and plain. Kronos, warned that one of his sons will overthrow him, eats his children as they are born. Saturn, his Roman name, is also Time, which consumes what it makes, and melancholy is the Saturnine humour. Every element of the image is the archetype: the father larger than the world, the child reduced to food, the act a defence against succession. The myth is not laid over a scene as an allusion. It is the structure of the picture, enacted by one body on another.
The inheritance is the mythological picture as the academies and courts knew it, an episode from Ovid ennobled by the body. Its nearest instance is Rubens’s Saturn of the 1630s, which Goya knew in the royal collection: a god in command, biting a child’s chest with deliberation. Goya’s own court practice stood behind him. His picture strips the myth of decorum, of setting and of narrative. There is no sickle and no hourglass, only a naked old man with wild hair, thin shanks and dirty hands, as mortal as any figure he painted, and the terror is in the devourer, not the victim.
The turn is a century ahead of the painting that took it up, and its cost was personal, not public. No public risk was run. The picture was made for a wall in the painter’s own house, and the way to it had been prepared across three decades, in the Caprichos, the Disasters of War and the late drawings, where Goya had already left decorum behind. The Third of May 1808, which stands at 9.0 on this desk, made its departure in a public canvas of 1814 that turned against its patriotic occasion; this one was made at home, for no one.
Movement IV
The flesh is built in a few greys and ochres, dragged and scraped rather than modelled, so that the body seems to come out of the dark and to be eaten by it. The god looks half-made, eroding as he eats. The fingers sink into the victim’s back in a few strokes that give pressure and weight. The red is rationed: it is used only where the act is, at the stump and at the mouth, and it is the one warm colour of any force in the picture. The figure, hunched, twisted and compressed, is drawn with the sureness of a painter of fifty years’ practice who had stopped needing correctness.
The form is the instrument of what the picture knows. The black is a void with no floor, so there is no world outside the act; the crop traps the figure in its frame as the act traps him; the upright field stands the body as tall as it allows. Painted in Rubens’s finish, with modelled flesh, a setting and a clear light, the same subject would tell a story about a god. This picture knows a condition. The costs are in the lower half: the body and legs are summary, in places unfinished rather than chosen, and the ground is a single undifferentiated black where other paintings of the house work theirs.
One law governs the field. Devourer and devoured are painted in the same greys by the same stroke and lit by no source, so that the eater is as much a ruin as the eaten, and the red belongs to both. Between the whites of the eyes at the top and the pale back in the hands there is nothing the law does not cover. What it covers is small: one figure, one body, one act on one ground. Within it the family, the generations, time, the sacred, the body and one terrified mind are held together; nature, labour, society, place and history are not there, except as the viewer brings them.
Movement V
Baron Émile d’Erlanger bought the house in the 1870s. Before the paintings were moved, J. Laurent photographed them on the walls. Between about 1874 and 1878, under Salvador Martínez Cubells, they were taken off the plaster and put on canvas, with losses and the retouching of another hand. How much the transfer changed this picture, and what the photograph shows that the canvas no longer does, is argued and is not settled here. The defining elements, the figure, the eyes, the act and the black, stand in the photograph and on the canvas alike. The wall is gone, and the room with it.
The paintings were shown in Paris in 1878 and given to the Spanish state, and they reached the Prado in 1881. For more than fifty years after it was painted the picture moved nothing, because nobody saw it; since then its presence has been wide, in the museum and in reproduction. It has become the emblem of the late manner, claimed as a source by Expressionism, by the Surrealist taste for the monstrous, by painters of the figure in extremity and by the modern imagery of horror. How much of that belongs to this canvas rather than to the Black Paintings and late Goya as a whole cannot be separated.
The literature has not closed. Whose body this is remains open: a son, as the myth requires, though it reads as adult and has been read as a woman’s. The picture has been read as political, under the restored absolutism of Ferdinand VII; as personal, about age and illness; and as Time and melancholy. In the early 2000s Goya’s authorship of the whole cycle was challenged; the Prado has not accepted the challenge, and the picture is scored as his. On the canvas in Madrid, about two centuries on, an old god still crouches in the dark with a body in his hands, his eyes still looking past what he is doing.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the image as it stands, part by part. The eyes cannot go: wide, white-rimmed, looking past what the hands are doing, they are the picture, and without them this is an ogre at a meal. The hands cannot go; they grip the body at the waist so hard the fingers sink in, and the grip is the compulsion. The headless body, pale, small and already mostly gone, cannot go, nor the black, the only setting, which leaves the figure nowhere to be but the act. The crop is compelled: the head pressed to the top edge, the knees cut by the lower, the god too large for the field. What yields is little: the summary knees and lower legs, and a dark left part of the field that is not needed.
Score: 9.0 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated, and it holds outside Goya’s Spain. The one who devours his children is not a tyrant at ease: he is terrified, and the terror drives the crime. Power that eats its own future does so for fear of being replaced, and the act gives it no pleasure. Rubens’s Saturn shows a god in command, biting with deliberation; this one is undone by what he does, and the eyes carry it without the myth’s name. Held below the top for two reasons: much of what the picture gives is dread, a state, and its social reading, a nation devouring its sons under Ferdinand VII, is brought to it rather than compelled by it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The elevation is terror, the sublime’s oldest register, at the highest pitch the medium reaches, and it rises in more than one place: the eyes, first and last seen; the mouth, open to the shoulder and dark with blood; the red of the stump, the only warm colour of any force against grey flesh and black; the fingers sunk into the pale back; the giant against the small body, so that dread comes from proportion as well as act. The register never changes. It is one instant at one temperature, with no relief and no second key, and at about 1.4 metres the size is a room’s, not a vault’s. Against works that rise again and again across a field or a cycle, it scores a step lower.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing: the myth is the picture. Kronos, warned that a son will overthrow him, eats his children as they are born, and Saturn, his Roman name, is also Time, which consumes what it makes. Every element is the archetype: the father larger than the world, the child reduced to food, the act a defence against succession. And the particular stays particular. There is no sickle and no hourglass, only a naked old man with wild hair, thin shanks and dirty hands, as mortal as any figure Goya painted. The archetype is not evoked by allusion; it is enacted by one body on another. Held below the very top because the myth is inherited whole rather than discovered in a particular.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance is the mythological picture as the academies and courts knew it: an episode from Ovid ennobled by the body, with Rubens’s Saturn of the 1630s its nearest instance and Goya’s own court practice behind him. The departure: a myth stripped of decorum, setting and narrative; a body scraped, smeared and dragged rather than modelled; black as the field, with no space and no light source; terror placed in the devourer, not the victim; and all of it made for a private wall, with no patron, buyer or public. Held below the top because the stake was private: nobody saw it in his lifetime, and the turn had been prepared over three decades of the Caprichos, the Disasters of War and the late drawings.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The knowledge is that the act consumes the actor, and it lives in the paint. The flesh is dragged and smeared, so the god looks half-made, eroding as he eats. The black is a void with no floor, so there is no world outside the act. The crop presses the head to the edge and traps the figure in its frame as in its compulsion, and the upright format stands the body as tall as the field allows. In Rubens’s finish the same subject knows a story about a god; this knows a condition. Held below the top because it was made for a wall among other walls and is now a different object, and because the summary lower body is less known than the rest.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: about 145 years in public, and a literature that has not closed. Who the victim is: a son, as the myth requires, though the body reads as adult and has been read as a woman’s. What the transfer from the wall removed. Whether the picture is political, under the restored absolutism of Ferdinand VII; personal, about age and illness; or about time and melancholy, the Saturnine humour. Whether the cycle had a programme, and what this image meant in its room. The image yields on return, the eyes reading as horror, guilt or madness by turns. Held below the top because the literature is shorter than for pictures seen for centuries, and a share of it concerns the cycle and the man rather than this image.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The work is published, so force and reach are scored together, in European painting from the 1820s on and Spanish painting first. The intrinsic force is very high: a painting may be private, unprogrammed and governed by the painter’s own dread; the mark may be raw; horror may be the whole of the image. The picture moves from the myth to the psyche, the claim Expressionism made generations later. The discount is heavy. For more than fifty years it moved nothing, because nobody saw it, and much of what is credited to it belongs to the Black Paintings and late Goya as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the Prado since 1881 and through reproduction it has become the emblem of that manner, claimed as a source by Expressionism, by the Surrealist taste for the monstrous and by the modern imagery of horror.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two centuries. The form is legible and whole in everything that makes the image: the figure, the eyes, the act, the black. Its first form, a mural in a room among other murals, is lost; the wall and the room are gone, and the picture is a canvas in a gallery, charged in proportion to what the room was to the work, which was something, though the image carries the work. Presence: none in public for some fifty years, and wide since 1881; fame counts as presence, not proof. Fabric: the transfer of the 1870s took the paint off its plaster, with losses and the retouching of another hand. That is heavy repair, and it holds the axis a step below a whole form of its age.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged as command of oil on plaster at the scale of a wall. The making is load-bearing. The flesh is built in a few greys and ochres, dragged and scraped, so the body seems to come out of the dark and to be eaten by it. The eyes are two whites and two dark points, placed so that the gaze misses the act. A few strokes sink the fingers into the victim’s back with pressure and weight. The red is rationed to where the act is. The costs: the lower body and legs are summary, in places unfinished rather than chosen; the ground is an undifferentiated black where other Black Paintings work theirs; and how much of the surface is Goya’s and how much the restorer’s cannot be separated.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the whites of the god’s eyes at the top of the field and the pale, broken back of the victim in his hands. They obey one law. Everything in the field is flesh made out of darkness by the same dragged stroke and lit by no source. Devourer and devoured are painted in the same greys, so that the eater is as much a ruin as the eaten, and the red belongs to both. The black admits nothing that could break the law. But narrowness is not coherence. The territory is one figure, one body and one act on one ground, at one temperature, and a law that governs it completely is held for the smallness of what it governs.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held in one small field are integrated by a single act: the family, a father and his child; succession and the generations; time, in the god who is Time; the sacred, in a god; the body, as eater and eaten; consciousness, in the terror of the eyes, the one mind in the picture. The state is held by reading, as the sovereign who devours his subjects, a reading the myth’s own theme of rule supports. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no nature, no labour, no society, no place and no history except as the viewer brings them. It is one figure against black, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, then The Inevitable, The Sublime, The Swerve and The Living Form at 9.0. A myth that is the structure of the image and not an allusion laid over it, the father larger than the world and the child reduced to food; a field from which almost nothing can be taken, the eyes, the hands, the black and the crop each required; terror at the highest pitch the medium reaches; a departure from the mythological picture so wide that it stands a century ahead of the painting that took it up; and a form in which dragged paint and a floorless black are what the picture knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: the family, the generations, time, the sacred, the body and one mind are held in a single act; nature, labour, society, place and history are not there, and the field holds one figure and one body. Below the rest, Pressure on Tradition and The Inner Law at 8.7, The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.8: a reach delayed by more than fifty years and hard to separate from the cycle; a law that governs completely a territory that is small; a disclosure that is partly dread, a state; and a picture taken off its wall, out of its room and onto canvas with losses and another hand’s retouching.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.1 and The Swerve at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear it by three tenths, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clears it by two. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 104.9, an average of 8.74 that displays 8.7, three tenths short of the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the picture as it now stands: oil on plaster, transferred to canvas, about 1.4 by 0.8 metres, painted on a wall of Goya’s house outside Madrid about 1819 to 1823, taken off the wall in the 1870s, and in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, since 1881. The surface is known from reproduction and description rather than from long looking, and the condition record and the losses of the transfer are not known in detail; where a judgment turns on them, on The Made, The Imperishable and Pressure on Tradition above all, it is held more loosely. The unit scored is this one Black Painting, as it stands, on canvas. The wall and the room it was painted for are lost, and their loss is weighed under The Imperishable only; the other Black Paintings, fourteen in the usual count, are context and are not scored. The transfer and its retouching are the work of later hands: they count as facts of survival and are not charged to the painter. Facts that could not be verified are left out or stated as open, among them the exact dimensions, the technique beyond oil, the picture’s place in the house and its neighbours there, the source of its title and of the house’s name, the extent of the losses and what J. Laurent’s photograph shows that the canvas does not, the sex and age of the victim, how the showing in Paris in 1878 was received, and who challenged the attribution and how widely the challenge is rejected. No words are quoted.