Hughes' point about the ilustrados and the pueblo is the most durable part of this essay. Goya saw the same structure Japan saw with Meiji reformers and China with May Fourth: liberal modernizers backed by the state, treated as foreign agents by the people they meant to liberate. The Spanish word was afrancesados — the Frenchified ones. The labels rotate across cultures; the suspicion doesn't. What survives every reframing of Goya is exactly what Hughes identifies: the refusal to grant either side — the people or their improvers — the moral monopoly each kept claiming.
Hughes' point about the ilustrados and the pueblo is the most durable part of this essay. Goya saw the same structure Japan saw with Meiji reformers and China with May Fourth: liberal modernizers backed by the state, treated as foreign agents by the people they meant to liberate. The Spanish word was afrancesados — the Frenchified ones. The labels rotate across cultures; the suspicion doesn't. What survives every reframing of Goya is exactly what Hughes identifies: the refusal to grant either side — the people or their improvers — the moral monopoly each kept claiming.
Hoya wanted so desperately to be a part of the knights of Malta that he created some of the most satanic visual imagery of his era.
He believed they were descendants of the Templars.
“there is no imaginable Goya that could mean as much to a Chinese as to a Europea” - is this true?