MASP

In 1774, Goya made some drawings about the life of people for tapestries of the court of Madrid. Much appreciated by the Spanish aristocracy, they marked the outset of his rise to artistic fame. In parallel to his work of painting portraits for the local elites, Goya also produced a sarcastic and caricatural series that reflected the horrors of his time. The artist was appointed to very high positions, including director of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, and chamber painter of Charles IV (1748-1819), in 1789. After becoming deaf due to an illness, Goya gave up both posts in 1797. Portrait of Cardinal Don Luis Maria de Borbon y Vallabriga (1798-1800) is one of four portraits painted by Goya in which the clergyman appears, to wit: a childhood portrait, a family portrait, and two paintings made after his religious appointment. It is believed that this version was produced for the occasion of his appointment as Cardinal and Archbishop of Seville, when he was about 20 years old. He is holding the insignias of the Order of Charles III and the Order of the Holy Spirit, along with an open breviary, a book containing the daily prayers of cardinals. There is a theatrical lighting concentrated on him and his surroundings, which makes it hard to perceive the true depth of the background. This continuity of the space and the intense colors create the dramatic and somewhat gloomy contrast that marks the painter’s style.

— MASP Curatorial Team

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By Xavier Bray
Today Goya is best known for his Maja Desnuda (Naked Maja) and for his images of witchcraft and haunting visions of crazed humanity painted on the walls of his house, known as the ‘Black Paintings’, but during his lifetime it was his portraits for which he was most famous. The principle objective of the exhibition that took place at the National Gallery, London, in the autumn of 2015, was to readdress Goya’s extraordinary output as a portrait painter, something that had not been previously attempted. In fact, a third of Goya’s painted oeuvre are portraits. He produced some of the grandest formal portraits in Spanish art, memorable both for the insight they provide into the relationship between the artist and sitter, and for their penetrating psychological depth. My role as the curator of the exhibition was to select a group of sixty portraits that best told the story; from Goya’s early beginnings at the court of Charles III in Madrid, through to his final years in Bordeaux, a career played out against the backdrop of war with France and the social, political and cultural shifts of the Enlightenment. The two portraits from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo played an extremely important role in the telling of this story. They were shown side by side in a room entitled ‘Liberals and Despots’ that contained portraits executed during the unsettling and distressing times of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain between 1808 and 1814. On one side of the room were the portraits Goya painted of French military officers, commissions Goya would have had to accept as the King’s official portrait painter, who at that time was Napoleon’s younger brother, Joseph Bonaparte. Next to the French portraits was Spain’s saviour, the Duke of Wellington, who defeated the French at the Battle of Victoria in August 1812. And finally, opposite the two São Paulo portraits, were the portraits of Ferdinand VII, who returned in 1814 from exile to reclaim the Spanish throne, and his right-hand man, the Duke of San Carlos. Goya portrayed the King wearing and holding all the necessary attributes to demonstrate that he was King by Divine Right, while the Duke de San Carlos, a profoundly reactionary man, poses in a confident and arrogant manner. At first one might be surprised to see two churchmen among a group of military figures. They certainly stood out in their heavy ecclesiastical robes with their relaxed and benign facial expressions. The young man wearing a Cardinal’s attire is Luis María de Borbón y Vallabriga, son of King Charles III’s younger brother, the Infante Don Luis. Of royal blood, he was appointed Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo in 1800 at the age of twenty-three and it is likely that the portrait was commissioned soon after to commemorate the event, although its date of execution is still debated and it might have been painted later during the French occupation. The second portrait, certainly painted between 1810 and 1812, represents one of the most influential ecclesiastical historians and intellects of the time, Juan Antonio Llorente. Despite their social differences, both were united in their desire to reform the Spanish Catholic Church and suppress the all-powerful Inquisition. Goya, although he never publicly voiced his opinions, would have sympathized with their ideas. Several plates in his celebrated series of satirical prints, Los Caprichos, and a number of his drawings along with a group of cabinet paintings are visual critiques of the ignorance, corruption and superstition he observed in the Church and the Inquisition. As we shall see, these two portraits were not just straightforward portrait commissions. They are charged with meaning, both for the sitters and Goya but also for Spain as a nation, desperate to break the shackles of the past and look forwards to a better and fairer society. Goya had known Luis María de Borbón y Vallabriga (1777-1823) since he was a child, when his father, the Infante Don Luis de Borbón, the younger brother of King Charles III, had invited him to paint his family in the summer of 1783. Only just beginning his career as a portrait painter, Goya was keen to impress his royal patron. The portrait Goya painted of his only son, Luis María, then aged six and three months, is very different from the one he was to paint seventeen years later. Standing confidently in his study, he wears a wig and an elegant suit of blue silk. He is standing in his playroom, in front of a table and chair holding a compass in one hand and a piece of a jigsaw puzzle in the other. The rest of the puzzle, which is on the table along with other paper maps, is likely to be a map of central Spain. Luis Maria is having his geography lesson, and Goya has given the small boy an air of princely importance. Yet, only two years later this courtly life was to suddenly come to an end. His father died in 1785 and because he had previously misbehaved at court (he was involved in a sexual scandal), he had been forced to live in exile and marry a woman of the lesser nobility. His children were as a result stripped of their hereditary titles and after Don Luis’s death immediately separated from their mother; the two daughters were sent to the convent of San Clemente, outside Toledo, while Luis María was dispatched for tutoring under Cardinal Lorenzana in preparation for an ecclesiastical career. It was only when Luis María’s sister, Maria Teresa de Borbón y Vallabriga (the future Countess of Chinchón), was made to marry Manuel Godoy in 1797, the all-powerful minister and favourite of King Charles IV, that they were finally allowed to add the name Borbón to that of their mother, Vallabriga, and regain their father’s privileges and property. In 1799, Luis María was made a Cardinal and the following year he was appointed Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain. It was almost certainly on this occasion that he was painted by Goya, looking almost startled by the dignity of his own ecclesiastical attire. Above the three tiers of his red robes, his diminutive pale face stares nervously out. And yet, as will be proved during the French occupation later, behind his fragile expression lay a strong, liberal-minded spirit; in 1812 he would uphold the Constitution of Cádiz, and he became President of the liberal Regency of Vitória in July 1813 that restored Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne. It was also Luis María who, in February 1814, would confirm what is now recognized as an official royal commission for two of Goya’s greatest compositions, The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, intended to greet the returning Ferdinand. Goya responded to the commission by stating that was his ‘ardent desire to record with his brush for posterity the most notable and heroic deeds or scenes of our glorious insurrection against the tyrant of Europe’. Despite Goya’s nationalistic stance in 1814, he had previously witnessed the extent to which the French occupation had brought many of the modern political ideas Spain had previously so desired. When Joseph Bonaparte established himself as the King of Spain in 1808, he introduced a political system based on meritocracy, reduced the power of the Church and abolished the Inquisition. Among those who collaborated with French during this period, which included several of Goya’s close friends, was the cleric Juan Antonio Llorente (1756-1823). A key intellectual in the Enlightenment movement’s attempts to suppress the Inquisition, he was the ideal person to employ to bring about the demise of such a powerful body. Llorente had worked for seventeen years in the Madrid office of the Spanish Inquisition, ultimately rising to the position of Secretary-General. With access to centuries of Inquisition files, Llorente wrote the first-ever history of the Inquisition, Historia crítica de la Inquisición en España (Critical History of the Inquisition in Spain), which was eventually published in France in 1818. The treatise was severe in its criticism of the antiquated practices of the Inquisition, and its denouncement of its secret trials would have chimed with Goya’s own views as revealed by his album drawings of the Inquisition (Album C, all in the Prado save one in the British Museum) and his paintings of an Inquisition trial, one of which is in the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid. Llorente is shown wearing the broad red collar of the Caballeros Comendadores (Knights Commander) of the Royal Order of Spain around his neck, an order created by Joseph Bonaparte to those loyal to the regime. He smiles benignly at the viewer, his hands clasped together clutching a white handkerchief together with swathes of his black robes. On his right hand we see a blue sapphire ring. Llorente stands in a beautifully delineated but entirely neutral space devoid of narrative detail; the greyish black wall behind him is subtly illuminated and modulated so that the figure stands out. It is the liveliness of Llorente’s features and his engaging smile that arrest the viewer; Goya suggests through his unostentatious and quiet portrayal an individual whose brilliant intellect was to be decisive in the ending of the brutal Inquisition. Yet, sadly this was not to be. One of the first things Ferdinand VII did on his return to Spain, who was to become Spain’s most unpopular King, was to restore the power of the Inquisition and create a secret police that would arrest all those who had collaborated with the French. Llorente was among many of Goya’s friends who were forced into exile. Goya, like all palace officials, was obliged to go through a ‘purification’ process. He was questioned about his involvement and collaboration with the French Regime and it was not until April 1815 that he was finally cleared of all suspicion. As an official portrait painter, Goya was obliged to portray whoever was in power and perhaps it was the artist’s grand and ostentatious portrait of Ferdinand VI of 1814, decked out in full royal regalia that allowed him to continue as a court employee. The many types of portraits that formed part of the exhibition- of friends, aristocrats, artists, politicians and royalty- demonstrated the incredible flexibility of Goya’s approach to portraiture. But it also showed, very subtly, that Goya was more than a painter of faces. He was genuinely interested in his sitters. He wanted to capture more than meets the eye and this could strongly be felt in the exhibition when one looked at the portraits of Cardinal Luis María de Borbón and Llorente hanging opposite Ferdinand VII and the Duke of San Carlos. At a glance one could see how Goya cold reveal intelligence and forgiveness on the one hand, and power, lies and hypocrisy on the other. Goya was a social commentator par excellence, and his portraits, despite having to comply with the trappings of social codes, contain a subtle and yet poignant critique of his contemporaries.

— Dr Xavier Bray was the Guest Curator of Goya: The Portraits (National Gallery, October 2015- January 2016) and is currently the Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2017

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The subject, incorrectly identified by Desparmet Fitz-Gerald, is the first-born of the morganatic marriage between Luis Antonio de Borbón and doña María Teresa de Vallabriga, the Infant, as she was known in Saragossa when, already widowed and carrying the title of Countess of Chinchón, she lived in the palace at “Calle de San Jorge”, which was to be named after her. (Rincón Garcia 1992, n. 35). Born in 1777, in Cadalso de los Vidrios (Madrid), in 1800 Luis María receives from the Pope the titles of cardinal and archbishop of Seville, which were subsequently transferred to Toledo. According to Gudiol and Rincón Garcia, the reason behind the execution of the portrait might have been the inauguration ceremony of the archdiocese. His father, who abdicated, was the brother of Ferdinand VI and Charles III, son of king Philip V and grandson of Louis XIV. Goya knew him quite well, as the father, Luis Antonio, was the first member of the royal family to give him commissions, in 1783, for portraits of himself, his family, friends, and relatives, and to this end invited him to stay four weeks in his residence in Arenas de San Pedro, one hundred kilometers from Madrid. Goya portrayed him twice, first at six, (Madrid, private collection, De Angelis n. 157), and then in the family portrait in Florence, the Ruspoli (subsequently Magnani) Collection (De Angelis, n. 165). The cardinal was also Godoy’s brother-in-law, as the latter was married to his sister, the famous countess of Chinchón, also portrayed by Goya. The portrait on display at Masp also belonged to Prince Ruspoli’s Collection. In the Portrait of Cardinal Luis María de Borbón y Vallabriga, the young cardinal is just past 20. He is depicted with the insignia of the orders of Charles III and of the Holy Spirit and holds a Breviary in his hands. The harmony of the red and gray hues on the canvas, shaded by a compact combination of glazing, boasts a truly symphonic extravagance, boldness and amplitude, anticipating the purely chromatic experiments with planes and surfaces carried out by painters such as Whistler and Manet at the height of the Ottocento. The Prado preserves another portrait of the infant-cardinal, a little older, a work of slightly bigger dimensions (214 x 136), formerly housed in the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato, in Rome. Furthermore, several copies as well as an avowed study of the head, exhibited in 1937, and subsequently lost, are also known.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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