In depicting salient moments of the spectacle of the bullfight, Goya chose to create a vision capable of capturing the atmosphere of tension and drama peculiar to the event, preferring the emotive dimension to the popularising, descriptive approach [...].

Francisco Goya’s graphic art still offers significant insight into the artist’s complex personality, torn between the ambition to play a part in the highest spheres of society at the time, which he fulfilled by becoming painter to the court of Charles III of Spain, and deep belief in the ideals of the Enlightenment and in an early form of Europeanism that won ever-increasing support in the intellectual circles he frequented. In addition to this dichotomy, we have the partial indecipherability of many of his works, which often present areas of shadow and ambiguity, giving rise to a profusion of different interpretations despite being explicit in iconographic and thematic terms. The unfathomable workings of his mind provided the basis both for the idea that his engravings, sometimes seen as the expression of tormented genius, present an accumulation of his innermost thoughts, and also for the notion of Goya as a forerunner of Romanticism and the contemporary artist, due to his reflection on questions regarding the autonomy of art and the pursuit of freedom in the dynamics between the public and private spheres.¹ It is thus possible to distinguish in his works a challenge to the values of the society of the time - in the form of a critique of the widespread conservatism and conformism imposed by the Inquisition and the exercise of monarchical power - and disillusionment over the betrayal of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the events bound up with the Peninsular War of 1808-14. While an enigmatic and sometimes contradictory foundation clearly emerges also from the officially commissioned works, it is above all in the graphic art and series of paintings such as the Pinturas negras (Black Paintings) that his pursuit of freedom of expression and determination to protest against the injustices of his day by revealing them fully manifests itself. 

Goya’s experience of engraving began during his apprenticeship in the workshop of the painter José Luzán y Martínez in Zaragoza, which was characterised by the study of drawing and copying from prints, followed by a trip to Italy between 1769 and 1771. It is in this period that he is believed to have seen the prints of Giambattista Piranesi and the copies of works by great masters such as Raphael and Titian. Echoes of this journey are to be found in the engraving of the flight into Egypt (La huida a Egipto),² presumably produced on his return to Spain but certainly on the basis of the drawings in his famous Cuaderno italiano (Italian sketchbook). He moved to Madrid the following year and produced engravings of paintings by Diego Velázquez, an artist he greatly admired, from 1778 while working at the Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara.³ 

From 1814 to 1816, Goya worked on the thirty-three plates of the Tauromaquia series, one of the only two editions of his prints to be published during his lifetime and the only one to circulate with no restrictions.⁴ Produced in a period when the artist no longer received official commissions from the court, it appears to have been aimed at a specific and already existing national market. Devoted to the traditional and popular spectacle of bullfighting, the edition could therefore prove more suitable for the larger market and find favour with the general public, who bought prints on a regular basis. Some critics have, however, glimpsed other possible interpretations of the series, associating the images of victors and vanquished with historical figures,⁵ on the one hand, and focusing on the other on the representation of the violence inherent in an event that celebrates the death of an animal - or much less frequently of a man - as an authentic form of entertainment.⁶ Given his passion for hunting, about which he wrote in letters to his friend Martín Zapater, Goya must have been very familiar with the dynamics of the struggle for survival. 

In depicting salient moments of the spectacle of the bullfight, Goya chose to create a vision capable of capturing the atmosphere of tension and drama peculiar to the event, preferring the emotive dimension to the popularising, descriptive approach taken by artists and printmakers of the time, such as Antonio Carnicero, whose engravings, published between 1787 and 1790, soon became a model.⁷ Circulating together with these visual sources in Spain were also books on the subject, such as the Carta histórica sobre el origen y progresos de las fiestas de toros en España (1777) by the poet Nicolás de Moratín, whose son Leandro was a friend of Goya, and the Tauromaquia ó arte de torear (1796), published under the name of Josef Delgado, a bullfighter known as Pepe Hillo, the subject of the last work in Goya’s series. In this deeply moving image, the dazzling light that floods the space is interrupted and disrupted by the dark body of the bull as it uses all its animal strength to gore the dying bullfighter on the ground. Men run to his aid, leaping over the barriers between the arena and the seating area, and thus imparting some movement, albeit minimal, to the frozen image of the death of Pepe-Hillo, killed by the bull Barbudo in Madrid in 1801.⁸

Alessandra Franetovich 

¹ The numerous publications on Goya’s graphic art include the following: Sánchez Cantón 1949; Harris 1964; Lafuente Ferrari 1977; Glendinning 1978; V. Bozal, “Los Caprichos: el mundo de la noche”, in Francisco de Goya grabador 1992; Pérez Sánchez, Gallego 1994; C. Garrido Sanchez, “La técnica goyesca de grabado, la otra imagen de Goya”, in Congreso Internacional Goya 1996, pp. 183-195; Matilla 1999.

² The engraving is hard to date. It may have been produced in 1774 on the occasion of the birth of his first son, Antonio Juan Ramón y Carlos.

³ Goya worked at the Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara from 1775 under Anton Raphael Mengs, the artistic director at the time, producing cartoons for tapestries to hang in the royal palaces. These depictions of carefree scenes already afford glimpses of the interest in the metaphorical dimension of images that was to be developed more consciously in the Caprichos. 

⁴ Ibid., p. 15.

⁵ Lafuente Ferrari 2007, pp. 43-123

⁶ Matilla, Medrano 2001.

⁷ See Goya y Carnicero, exhibition catalogue (Madrid, Fundación Cultural Mapfre Vida, 30 June - 4 September 2005) Madrid.

⁸ Wilson-Bareau 2016, pp. 219-224.