Goya

I am about halfway through Robert Hughes's biography on Goya. It is a good read (something Hughes can always be counted on to provide), but suffers from the usual faults that bedevil his writing - excessively self-conscious moments of cleverness, moments of vulgarity that seem calculated to show that while Hughes knows a great deal about art he is still an Aussie bloke who will sit down for a few Fosters with you, and a pathological dislike of Roman authority. At least he admits his status as a former Catholic right at the beginning (with particularly nasty digs at Venerable Pius XII and the devotion to Our Lady of Fatima) , so it is not like he is trying to hide something.

He fetishizes the "achievements" of Endarkenment philosophers and bemoans the fact that dusty and conservative Spain did not produce these things. Personally I would take a good bit of authoritarian dustiness over bragging rights to ninnies like Rousseau or later abominations like Foucault (you can probably reverse the adjectives and still be in the ballpark). He also makes a monumental mistake regarding the Inquisition, insisting, contrary to the good source he cites in the matter (Henry Kamen's Spanish Inquisition, published in 1997 by Yale University Press), that the Holy Office was obsessed with limpieza de sangre legislation. In fact the Inquisition was opposed to this, rather it was the nobility and royalty that kept pushing these proto-Nazi laws, in spite of opposition from the Holy Office, which was more concerned with doctrinal purity over some fetishized cult of blood and race.

Hughes also perpetrates the myth of the Inquisition burning witches. It simply was not that involved in this noble activity (it probably should have been, but seems to have found that sort of thing distasteful). Understand that I think very highly of the Spanish Inquisition as well as the general practice of burning witches, but cannot really credit these holy friars with that activity. As loathe as I am to give any credit to Protestantism as a body, they were much more active in the burning of witches.

There, that was my ecumenical moment for the day. Protestants did something good that Catholics were neglecting.

Please note that I am not offering a criticism on the methods of detecting witches. Perhaps they were ignorant of mental health issues, and were persecuting the sick, which was unfortunate, perhaps they were simply burning proto-radical feminists, in which case it was a happy accident. I don't know. I am simply approving of the burning of known witches. I am more than happy to accept leniency when the method of witch detection is unreliable (and what else floats?).

But back to Hughes and Goya. Something that really bugs me is that whenever Goya was genuinely pious and Catholic in his content, Hughes tries to whitewash it as either a cynical movement or purely cultural. In fact, the view of Goya as an artist is much more coherent if one accepts his pious work at face value and does not try to impose Hughes's own anti-Catholicism into the picture. In fairness, Hughes does let down the facade a few times and describes Goya as more anti-clerical than anti-Catholic, something that, given the state of the Spanish clergy of the time, is not that difficult to understand.

Also, Hughes insists on equating any concern for the common good on the part of Carlos III as an affection towards the Endarkenment. It simply escapes Hughes that one can be a good Catholic and want to see things like better public hygene, fair land reform, etc. Hughes prefers the myth that conservativism was inherently about furthering the misery of the Spanish people.

It would be easy to blame the Jesuits, who educated Hughes, and certainly my second impulse, after blaming the evils of the world on Protestantism is to point my finger at Jesuits, but Hughes seems to have drawn from standard issue secular humanism much more than 20th century SJ diabolism (yes, yes, there were and are some good Jesuits out there, I realize that).

What Hughes gets right is the thing that he always gets right: he knows how to look at art. Many art historians and critics simply lack the understanding of what makes art tick. They look with their ears and are too swayed by theories that are ungrounded from the actual experience of taking deep, long looks at art. Hughes is at his most enjoyable when he makes mincemeat of these theories, and he is always able to back his opinions up with the piece under consideration.

I am only at the halfway point, but will probably finish reading the book this week and will give a report when I am done. So far, I much prefer The Shock of the New or Art in America, though.