By Keri O’Shea
Few artists can boast such a versatile career as Francisco De Goya, although the great changes in his style through the five decades in which he worked were often tragic in origin. It is hard to reconcile Goya’s early work as a portrait painter to the Spanish royal court with the harsh, distended figures in his last paintings, but the latter were refracted through years of ill-health, and Goya’s own increasing alienation from a Spain which he thought was become retrogressive, anti-liberal. The fame of the so-called ‘Black Paintings’, of which the painting above is one, is ironic considering that it’s unlikely Goya ever wanted them to be seen. He never named them, displayed them or discussed them: having withdrawn entirely from public life by the time in which he was working on them, Goya, towards the end of his life by this point, painted these pieces directly onto the walls of his villa. However, they were discovered after his death, their importance was recognised, and they now form part of one of the most scintillating displays in Madrid’s Prado Gallery – a series of striking vistas of fear, death, ageing and the sinister supernatural which forms a strong contrast to the rooms upon rooms of Annunciations, Crucifixions and Resurrections.
The modern Spain of the 1820s had, in Goya’s eyes, become a sham: the Peninsular Wars had spread conflict and death, and he saw the combined forces of the monarchy and clergy which had gained in power in the years after the wars as reactionary, opposed to the progress and reason which the Enlightenment had promised. In this decade, Goya’s paintings take on a deeply nightmarish aspect. The Black Paintings are in many ways Goya’s protest against his times, as well as an expression of his terror at his own decline. One of the most famous of these has come to be called ‘The Great He-Goat’.
Goya had used the image of the coven before he came to paint The Great He-Goat. In 1798, for example, he had painted a similar scene (in a painting which is simply known as Witches’ Sabbath) – but despite the similarities in set-up between these two, the execution is massively different. The earlier painting has an attractive, Romantic landscape with a feeling of distance and depth; there is an abundance of colour, from the night sky to the simple, but bright fabrics worn by the women. When he revisited the image of the coven in the 1820s, much had changed.
This is, first and foremost, a large painting (55 x 93 inches in size) and yet, for all that, it feels cramped, claustrophobic. In contrast to the earlier coven, The Great He-Goat shows a much bigger group of people – maybe twenty or thirty – all rapt with attention and focused completely on the silhouetted He-Goat, who sits, neatly robed in what looks like clerical garb on the ground before them. This is a repellent group, too: although there are one or two younger faces amongst the gathered (at least judging by a glimpsed hairstyle on the left-hand side of the picture) and at least one male face, most of those present are older or elderly women – and ugly faces predominate, with heavy or distorted features in abundance. Some faces are rendered more or less as skulls, and some faces seem barely human at all: observe the figure sitting at the He-Goat’s feet. What is also striking about this coven is that, although there are identifiable faces in their midst, this seems like an amorphous mass, rather than a meeting of true individuals. The common ugliness, the common colourlessness, the proximity of one person to another, the way in which all of the gathered are huddled on the floor to listen to proceedings gives an impression of a lack of individuation.
One or two figures stand out from this meeting, though. A crone at the far left of the scene seems to be writing notes on whatever is being said which has so fascinated the rest of the group; at the feet of the Goat there looks like more written notes and an ink-pen. A collision between modernity and superstition perhaps? Coven this may be, but with a scribe and a written record present, it looks as though bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily guarantee reason and order, which seems to be what Goya felt when he created this piece of art. Then, sitting apart from (and being completely ignored by) the others is the painting’s only visibly youthful and attractive character, a rather genteel and well-dressed young girl who appears to be a prospective initiate. Passively, with none of the vividity of the other figures, she faces the He-Goat, and waits. Her fate, should she be accepted, is to become one of the horde who seem more intrigued by the procedure of enrolment than by her as an individual.
The Great He-Goat is a painting of anger, hopelessness and despair, created by a man who saw the next generation in Spain being enslaved by the old irrationality which he had hoped was in decline. It is an ominous painting, reflecting the anxieties of the impending Ominous Decade. The coven here is a therefore used as a symbol of the fear of resurgent barbarism – of people’s propensity to throw in their lot with systems and beliefs which had seemed to be relics of the past. Horror cinema has continued to use the coven or the secret society, often in similar ways to Goya, riffing on the idea that modernity is in fact a very tenuous thing and, more so, that it could be jeopardised by covert groups working in its midst. Modern horror has added an important difference of its own, however: here, those who would inflict harm in private look respectable in public, such as in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Lords of Salem (2013), to name but two. If we can unite Goya’s work with modern horror in one fundamental way, though, it is through understanding that history is not a straight line, moving from darkness upwards towards progress; it is a series of peaks and troughs, and the actions of even small groups of people can precipitate the sort of decline that we may, in our arrogance, assume is long behind or beneath us. In that, we may share Goya’s rage and frustration.
You can see a larger version of The Great He-Goat here.
