Goya – Sein Leben und seine Zeit
Geboren 1846 als Sohn eines Vergolders und einer aus verarmtem Adel stammenden Mutter, erhielt Francisco José Goya y Lucientes eine künstlerische Ausbildung in seiner Heimatstadt Saragossa.
Nach einem Italienaufenthalt betrieb er seit 1774 in Madrid seinen Aufstieg vom Entwerfer von Tapisserievorlagen bis zum Mitglied der königlichen Akademie und zum Hofmaler dreier Könige.
Eine 1792–1793 erlittene schwere Krankheit mit bleibender Taubheit führte ihn zur schrittweisen Befreiung aus offiziellen Zwängen. Nach dem Tod seiner Frau Josefa Bayeu lebte er mit seiner neuen Lebensgefährtin Leocadia Weiss zurückgezogen im Landhaus Quinta del Sordo (Villa des Tauben). In seiner Graphik reagierte er als aufgeklärter Freigeist auf gesellschaftliche Umbrüche zwischen Liberalisierung und Unterdrückung sowie die Schrecken des Guerillakriegs gegen napoleonische Besatzer. Vor der Bedrohung durch das rückschrittliche Schreckensregime von Ferdinand VII. wich er 1824 ins Exil nach Bordeaux aus, wo er 1828 starb.
Goya – His Life and Time
Born in 1746 to José Benito de Goya y Franque, a gilder, and Gracia de Lucientes y Salvador, a member of an impoverished noble family, Francisco José Goya y Lucientes trained as an artist in his hometown of Zaragoza.
In the early 1770s, after a period in Italy, he embarked on a career that would take him from designing tapestries to becoming a member of the Royal Academy and court painter to three kings.
In the wake of a serious illness in 1792–93, which left him permanently deaf, he was able to gradually shake off the rigid constraints of “official” art. After the death of his wife Josefa Bayeu in 1812, he retreated to the Quinta del Sordo (Villa of the Deaf Man), a farmhouse then on the outskirts of Madrid, where he lived with his new companion, Leocadia Weiss. Goya had come to artistic maturity in the Age of Enlightenment and espoused its ideas. In his graphic work, he responded to the turmoil of a society caught between liberalization and repression and to the horrors of guerrilla warfare against the Napoleonic occupation. In 1824, ten years after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, he fled Ferdinand VII’s reactionary regime of terror and went into exile across the border, in Bordeaux, where he died in 1828.
2024-06-17
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