The enduring deception of Francisco Goya.(Art)

SHAKESPEARE WAS WILLING and able wondrously to dissemble and embellish the Tudors' ascent to the throne, but later generations saw through the splendidly lettered curtain, and now we know otherwise. We have also seen through Jacques Louis David's magnificent effort and know that it was a mule and not a noble stallion that carried the Corsican over the Alps to victory at Marengo; but the disconcertingly naive ruse contrived by Francisco Goya to survive the troubles of post-Napoleonic Spain endures to this day.

Contrary to popular belief, there can be no doubt that on the third of May, 1808, when the French soldiers in the deservedly famous painting were firing on those terrified, probably superstitious and priest-ridden Spanish rioters, Goya was decidedly on the side of the executioners. (1) It was six long and eventful years later, in 1814--when King Joseph I and the French army had been routed out of Spain, Napoleon was on his way to Elba, an aggrieved Ferdinand VII was galloping back to the throne vacated by the fallen emperor's brother, and when Goya fully expected that his conduct would require explanation--that he hastily put brush to canvas and produced the accidental masterpiece with which posterity has so successfully been conned into exonerating him from the charge of collaboration with the French.

It is not easy to quarrel with Francis Haskell when he asserts that figurative art can provide reliable insights into the past only if it is authentic and "as long as it had been created at the same time as the persons or events with which it was concerned". (2) Goya did indeed paint The Third of May, but not at the same time as the event with which it was concerned; the masterpiece is more eloquent about its creator than about the incident it purports to depict. Of course the painting owes much of its lasting popularity to the skill of the artist, but not a little also to the success of a carefully timed act of political expediency assisted by latter-day attributions of emblematic clarity and moralistic intent by generations of careless art historians, exuberant critics and political activists. It is impossible not to conclude that it is only by intentionally overlooking the evidence to the contrary that these unusual dilettanti have continued to claim the artist and his canvas as partners in their campaigns against war, against state-sponsored violence, against repression and impersonal cruelty, and more recently, against the United States and its allies.

Even a perfunctory Google excursion produces a surfeit of assertions about the artist's presumed conviction "that war of any kind produces no good", or that "war is always wrong", (3) sentiments that a modicum of agile contortionism has rendered serviceable to entities such as the Irish Anti-War Movement (sic) whose publications proclaim not only that "Goya's The Third of May 1808 ... [is] the very first singularly and unflinchingly anti-war painting in Western art", but also the inspiration and antecedent for "Spain's new-found commitment to withdrawing its troops from the dreadful quagmire that is present-day Iraq, creating a domino withdrawal effect on numerous other countries that are part of the so-called Coalition of the Willing ..." Kenneth Clark went a tad further and in his Looking at Pictures asserted that The Third of May "is the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject and in intention, and it should be a model for the socialist and revolutionary painting of the present day".

DISTANT FROM SUCH interpretations, the events that led to that memorable day are sufficiently clear. In 1808 Buonaparte persuaded the Spanish monarch Charles IV to abdicate in favour of his pathetically inadequate son Ferdinand who, on Napoleon's instructions, abdicated in favour of the Emperor who then presented the Spanish crown to his brother Joseph, an amiable man of a decidedly liberal, reformist disposition, at the time doing his bit for the Corsican family as King of the Two Sicilies. Once summoned, Joseph promptly reached Spain together with a formidable French army to be enthroned as King Joseph I.

In Madrid there was a confused scuffle with some French soldiers that led to rioting, casualties and prisoners, some of whom were executed summarily. This presented the large number of Francophiles in the Spanish court and intelligentsia, better known as afrancesados or "Frenchified", most of whom were as liberal and reformist as their new monarch, with something disquietingly similar to the dilemma that Malraux wittingly suggested would confront communists after the occupation of their country by Russian troops. (4) What is proposed here is that the available factual and circumstantial evidence indicates that contrary to the mostly politically inspired popular interpretations of the authorship of the famous painting, on that fateful third of May of 1808, and the years that followed, Goya was not aligned with those who took arms against the French invasion, but with the afrancesados, and among these, with the Josefinos, as those who agreed to serve King Joseph I became popularly known.

The facts are few, but weighty. In 1809, a year after the executions of the third of May and about the same time that Napoleon consolidated his control over the continent with the momentous victory at Wagram, his brother Joseph I asked Goya to take the helm of a committee appointed to choose fifty representative Spanish paintings to be sent to the "Napoleon Museum" then under formation in Paris. The painter agreed and a list was compiled including works by Zurbaran, Velazquez, Murillo and Ribera. Goya was then hard at work painting portraits of Joseph I, of his mistress Pepita, daughter of the Marquis of Montehermoso, of his aide-de-camp, General Nicholas Guye, of Manuel Romero, the notorious Josefino Minister of Police, and of the French General Joseph Querault. The painter signed an oath of allegiance to Joseph I and the grateful monarch awarded him the Royal Order of Spain, which he had created specifically to distinguish those who rendered services to the new Buonaparte dynasty.