A boy of about ten, when he reaches the canvas, bends his knees, raises his head, and looks up as if trying to understand what the dog is looking at, one of the most famous in the history of universal art and the sole protagonist of the painting described by Antonio Saura as “the most beautiful painting in the world”.
Among the chiaroscuro of the room with Goya’s black paintings Prado Museum -room, oval, almost dark with dim light- Many young viewers, especially foreigners, have intuition.
They are fascinated by the mysterious and gloomy atmosphere of these 14 painted works. Oil by the Aragonese artist on the walls of Quinta del Sordo, which has been the painter’s home for four years, and it still hides more secrets than certainties.
Baron Frédéric Émile d’Erlanger, one of the most visited places of the museum, from the Belgian banking family and residing in Paris, he failed to sell any of his most terrifying works. goya At the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878 [D’Erlanger se había hecho con ellas tras comprar la Quinta en 1873, 50 años después de que se hicieran las pinturas, datadas entre 1819 y 1824].
Anomaly
“They were seen as nothing interesting, almost an anomaly, something very strange offhand. We relate them today. with surrealism, expressionism, artistic trends of the 20th century, and they are already familiar to us, but not in their time,” says Miguel Hermoso, a doctor of Art History specializing in Spanish and Italian Baroque painting and a professor of Art at the Complutense University of Madrid.
After several attempts to get money from them, the aristocrat Donated to the Prado Museum in 1881. Prado curator Salvador Martínez Cubells was responsible for ripping the paintings off the wall, and unfortunately, their elements and details were lost in the complex process of transferring them to canvas.
Even before this period, paintings on the adobe walls of the Quinta, located on a hill in the former municipality of Carabanchel Bajo, on the outskirts of Madrid, Very close to the Segovia Bridge, it had already had color drift, cracks, plaster fill or repainted.
“The technique of removing fresco paintings was quite advanced and experiments were done with Raphael, for example, but for an oil on the wall it was more difficult and did not work in most cases. It was a very intense process. Inside councilfor example, about 50 centimeters of the picture was lost” Explains Miguel Hermoso.
The only way to know exactly what the original composition of the works was was through photographs that Jean Laurent took before dismantling the Quinta in the 1970s. “The photos were actually taken to help sell them,” says this college professor.
The photos reveal an anomaly in the frame. half sunken dog This is what has survived: the two birdlike spots that appeared in the original work, the dog’s he would be watching them intently, as if waiting for a clue to hunt them down.
This is how various art historians argue, for example Carlos Foradada of Aragon in his doctoral thesis. The spectator’s participation in the pictorial space of Goya’s black paintings He concludes that Laurent’s footage shows this. “in many cases many original aspects of paintings have little to do with what has been preserved” At the Madrid art gallery.
two birds in flight
He explains that in Laurent’s original image, the dog was “looking at two birds in flight” instead of being just before it sank, as it happened historically. For the doctor, this would mean that Goya would have painted “freedom before Picasso”, depicting the free flight of birds. Another Goya expert, Jose Manuel Arnaizalso holds tightly in his book Goya’s black paintings that the dog carefully observes some birds.
For Hermoso, however, the unknown remains, because, according to estimates, 40 years had passed since the pictures were made when the photographs were taken. and they could have bumps or spikes. “The photo isn’t very precise,” he argues.
“[El perro] Is he sinking into the sand or are we seeing him from behind a dune and staring at some bird signaling the hunter that he’s coming for them? Professor Hermoso asks himself to confirm the next:
– The second is a very suitable thing for an insignificant rural farm, but if we understand that there is a dog sinking in the sand, which will die in a few minutes, and looking up with his eyes, the higher we raise, the more indifferent to the suffering of this animal, who cannot ask for help, who is completely indifferent to the suffering of man and who is in the War of Independence. We understand that there is a certain compassion in the face of a nature that makes us think about pain and suffering. that some men cause others. Depending on what we understand, it could be a typical cottage or something transcendent.
as in Saturn devouring his children, Judith and Holofernesanyone Two old men eating soup It’s pretty clear what Goya wanted to show, other pictures like this are “pretty vague”, but this one speaks to the “greatness” of Goya, according to Hermoso’s estimation:He is a writer who does not guide you by hand. and it gives you the subject that has been trampled on and clarified, but it deprives you of references and you don’t really know what to understand”.
Although it is believed to be on the second floor, where exactly the painting was placed on the Fifth floor remains a mystery. In fact, the exact layout of the work in the two-story country house is still subject to assumptions, this makes it particularly difficult to find the exact meaning of the paintings, and therefore the global meaning also becomes one of the greatest enigmas of Spanish art.
For more lavishness, Goya’s most terrifying and agonizing works are painted on the luminous landscapes and idyllic scenes of his time. He lived as reflected in the radiological studies carried out in his time by the Prado Museum Technical Documentation Office.it was later led by conservative Carmen Garrido.
What is clear from the dog’s picture is that Goya’s definitely ahead of its time.
“It’s almost an abstract painting,” Hermoso explains, “you get the dog’s head and it might be a Rothko. [Mark Rothko, expresionista abstracto]. Simply, this minimal naturalistic detail There is a figurative composition that shows”.
For those who love Goya and especially this painting, there is a nice tribute to the painter, who is very close to the Caramuel Health Center in Puerta del Ángel, a few meters from where the famous Quinta del Sordo used to be. Marco Prieto, an artist from Madrid, recently painted the painting on one of the sides of one of the most vertical buildings in the area. However, the birds that fly there every day are not discerned.
Source: Informacion
