Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

Look at *The Family of Charles IV* (1800) and the painter who composed it gave the royal family back to itself with a slightly horrifying accuracy — the queen is plain, the king is dim, the children stand with a frozen formality that has nothing to do with grace. Look at *The Third of May 1808* (1814) and the same painter renders a Spanish civilian arms outstretched in a white shirt under a lantern, facing a row of faceless French soldiers about to shoot him. There is no martyrdom in the picture, only the murder. Then look at the prints — the *Disasters of War* (1810-20), eighty-two etchings of atrocity Goya never published in his lifetime: a man hanged from a tree by his crotch, a child crawling among corpses, captioned *No se puede mirar* ("One cannot look at this"). And then, finally, the Black Paintings (1819-23) — fourteen images Goya painted directly onto the walls of the country house outside Madrid where he lived as a deaf old man, not for any patron, not for sale, including the unbearable *Saturn Devouring His Son*. He never named them. He never showed them. They were transferred to canvas after his death.

On the consumed-observation to commissioned-devotion axis the Artist Studies arc reads through, Goya is the artist who breaks the axis. He took the commissions; he kept the salary; he painted the kings. And then he refused the posture commissioned-devotion required and did the other work anyway — work that named war as war, the church as the church, the powerful as the small things they often are. Vela reads him for what it looks like when a painter refuses to either flatter or moralise, and for the strange courage of doing both halves of the work without ever pretending the contradiction is resolved.