Francisco de Goya
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, known as Francisco de Goya, born on March 30, 1746 in Fuendetodos, near Saragossa, and died April 16, 1828 in Bordeaux, France, is a Spanish painter and engraver.
His work includes easel paintings, murals, engravings and drawings. He introduced several stylistic ruptures that initiated romanticism and announced the beginning of contemporary painting.
Goyesque art is considered as a forerunner of the pictorial avant-gardes of the twentieth century.
After a slow apprenticeship in his native land, bathed in late baroque style and pious images, he traveled to Italy in 1770, where he came into contact with the neo-classicism he adopted when he moved to Madrid Mid-decade, in parallel with a Rococo style related to his job as a tapestry designer for the Royal Manufactory of Santa Barbara.
His teaching, both in these activities and as a painter of the Chamber, was assured by Raphael Mengs, while the most famous Spanish painter was Francisco Bayeu, Goya's brother-in-law.
He contracted a serious illness in 1793 which brought him closer to more creative and original paintings, around less consensual themes than the models he had painted for the decoration of the royal palaces. A series of tin paintings, which he called "caprice and invention", initiated the maturity phase of the painter and the transition to romantic aesthetics.
His work also reflects the caprices of the history of his time, and especially the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars in Spain. The War Disasters series is almost a modern report on the atrocities committed and highlights a heroism in which victims are individuals who do not belong to a particular class or condition.
The celebrity of his work La Maja nue is partly related to the controversies about the identity of the beautiful woman who served as a model. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, he also began to paint other portraits and thus opened the way to a new bourgeois art.
At the end of the Franco-Spanish conflict, he painted two large canvases on the May 2, 1808 uprising, setting a precedent both aesthetic and thematic on historical paintings, which not only informs about the events experienced by the painter, but also A message of universal humanism.
His masterpiece is the series of oil paintings on dry wall that decorate his country house, the Black Paintings. With them, Goya anticipates contemporary painting and various avant-garde movements of the twentieth century.
Some of his works
The Third of May 1808
The Colossus 1808–1812
Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga 1787–88
The Black Duchess 1797
The Family of the Infante Don Luis 1784
