The expressive body in Goya's Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent.

Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], painted by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) in 1788, is one of the most astonishing works in an oeuvre replete with remarkable images. In the decade and a half since its inclusion in Robert Rosenblum's survey of nineteenth-century art, this canvas has become widely known among scholars and their students. Rosenblum, following a line of interpretation that dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, uses this painting to support a symptomatic reading of Goya's art, which he describes as "the most sharply accurate mirror of the collapse of the great religious and monarchic traditions of the West."(1) Goya scholars also have tended to view the work as marking a significant turning point, albeit within a more circumscribed frame of reference, for it is in this picture that the fantastic makes its initial appearance in the artist's work.(2) Absent from both of these interpretive models is any suggestion of how the painting might have been understood at the time of its creation.

As is common with Goya's art, there is little in the way of documentary evidence around which to construct a context. The one known document is an invoice dated October 16, 1788, in which the artist requests payment from the duke and duchess of Osuna for "two pictures that he has painted, representing passages in the life of Saint Francis Borgia for the new chapel that has been constructed at your expense in the Cathedral of Valencia."(3) The paintings were intended for the side walls of a chapel honoring the sixteenth-century saint, who had served as third father general of the Society of Jesus and was a famous ancestor of the duchess of Osuna. The Osunas were among the artist's most important patrons over the next fifteen years, commissioning a wide range of works, beginning with a pair of portraits of the duke and duchess in 1785 (G-W 219,220).(4) In 1787 Goya delivered a series of seven pictures depicting "rural themes" for their country house on the outskirts of Madrid (G-W 248-54). The following year he painted a large-scale family portrait (G-W 278) and undertook the paintings depicting Saint Francis Borgia, after whom the Osuna heir had been named. In the late 1790s the Osunas commissioned a group of small-scale scenes of witchcraft for their country house (G-W 659-64), and they purchased four sets of the Caprichos in January 1799. Around that time, Goya again painted the duke's portrait (G-W 674), and in 1805 he executed a stunning portrait of their daughter, the marchioness of Santa Cruz, dressed in Empire fashion (G-W 828).

Although nothing is known of the terms of the Borgia chapel commission, the works by Goya would have been intended to complement the main altarpiece, painted by one of his artistic rivals, Mariano Salvador Maella (1739-1819).(5) Dedicated on October 10, 1788, Maella's canvas (in situ and in poor condition) portrays The Conversion of Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, an event that occurred when he saw the decayed corpse of the Empress Isabella, wife of Charles V, at her burial and suddenly realized the transitory nature of earthly pleasures. Goya's picture for the left wall of the chapel, entitled Saint Francis Borgia Taking Leave of His Family (G-W 240), narrates the result of the religious awakening depicted in Maella's altarpiece. The duke, having been widowed in middle age, bids farewell to his relatives as he departs to join the Jesuit order upon the maturity of his eldest son. The work is anecdotal and sentimental in character, with Francis and his heir embracing on the steps of the family palace at Gandia while other members of the family and household look on.(6) The emotional reactions of the assembled figures, enacted through individualized physiognomies, lend the canvas an air of pathos, while the richly painted brocades and draperies bring to mind the rich surfaces of Giambattista Tiepolo, who had worked in Spain as first court painter to Carlos III from 1762 until the former's death in 1770.(7)

In contrast to this costume piece, Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, executed for the right wall, presents the viewer with a truly amazing mystical drama. The saint is dressed in a simple priest's robe, his head encircled by a ring of divine light that echoes the form of the window behind him. Holding a crucifix in one hand, the other raised in a gesture of astonishment, he stares spellbound toward the figure laid out before him. The dying man's agonies are inscribed unmistakably and with striking frankness in his naked body: the rigid limbs, heaving chest, sunken eyes, slightly open mouth, and grasping hand all suggest his suffering, and these torments are underscored by the agitated sheets that partially conceal his flesh. In addition to the two protagonists, four demonic creatures hover in a cluster behind the sinner, their infernal origin indicated by the flames surrounding them. Frank Heckes has pointed out that the subject depicted here is not an exorcism, as had been assumed previously, but rather a damnation that is narrated in vivid detail in an eighteenth-century account of the saint's life written by Cardinal Alvaro Cienfuego and entitled La heroica vida, virtudes, y milagros del grande S. Francisco de Borja. The text, which Goya's painting closely matches, describes how the carved image of the crucified Christ held by Francis, having realized that the soul of a particular dying man could not be saved,

... detached its [the Crucifix's] nailed right arm, and placing its hand in that profusely bleeding lacerated wound in its chest, withdrew a fist filled with blood, and hurled it with indignation at the frowning, denigrated face, saying "Since you scorn this blood, which was shed for your glory, let it serve for your eternal unhappiness." Then that pitiful man, with an awful, blasphemous shout directed against Jesus Christ, gave up his soul, convulsed by a horrid moan, and it was turned over to the infamous ministers of fire and fright.(8)

Goya's pictorialization of these "infamous ministers of fire and fright" emphasizes their fantastic character, and nothing in the artist's work up to this point anticipates the imaginative force of their bizarre forms. It is hardly surprising, then, that these creatures have been the focus of most modern scholarship on the painting. Usually they are viewed teleologically, as the ancestors of the imaginary beings who populate much of the work that Goya would execute during the second half of the 1790s, including the witchcraft paintings for the Osuna country house (ca. 1797-98) and the print series the Caprichos, as well as the drawings leading up to it (1797-99), and who would return periodically in the artist's subsequent uncommissioned art.(9) In addition to regarding the demons in the Valencia painting as antecedents for the supernatural strain in Goya's later career, efforts have been made to locate visual precedents for them, with the art of Hieronymus Bosch, Spanish medieval images of the Last Judgment, and Henry Fuseli's Nightmare frequently cited by scholars as possible sources of inspiration.(10) Moreover, it is tempting to suggest that the Osunas' taste for the supernatural in the 1790s dictated the presence of the fantastic beasts in the Valencia deathbed scene. However, as Nigel Glendinning has pointed out, their taste was more conservative in the 1780s.(11)

In this essay, I wish to propose another means of approaching Goya's painting, one that views it not as a harbinger of things to come, as based on specific artistic precedents, or as circumscribed by the conditions of patronage, but rather as deeply embedded in aesthetic developments taking place in Spain around the time of its creation. As a point of departure, I will examine the analysis of the picture offered by Pedro de Silva in the oration he wrote for the 1795 prize-giving ceremony of the Royal Academy of S. Carlos in Valencia.(12) Silva's text is one of the few substantial contemporary commentaries on Goya's art that has come down to us, and his reading of the image differs fundamentally from that proposed in recent scholarship. Rather than focusing on the demons, he centers his discussion on the dying man, as indicated in the title he uses to refer to the painting: The Condemned Man of the Cathedral (El Condenado de la Seo). Only at the end of his analysis - and in a single sentence - does he mention the "zealous" attitude of the saint, and the "other figures [los demas personajes]" who react to the events before them with "admiration, surprise, and terror" (30). Modern scholars have taken Silva's ambiguous reading of the ontology of these monsters (that is, as "personajes") to indicate that he did not understand their demonic nature. As a result, when his text is mentioned at all it is relegated to the footnotes and used to suggest that Goya's contemporaries often failed to grasp the meaning of his art.(13)