The gestural language in Francisco Goya's Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666280902843647
ISSN1943-2178
Autores Tópico(s)Photographic and Visual Arts
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Earlier versions of this article were presented in 2005 at the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana University at Bloomington, and the University of Haifa. I thank the participants at these events for their enriching questions and suggestions. For their invaluable comments on various drafts of the manuscript, I would like to express my gratitude to David Dawson, Yoram Goldman, Efrat El-Hanany, Giles Knox, Christopher Pearson, and Daniel Unger. I am also deeply indebted to Mitchell Merback for his constructive criticism in the final stages of this paper. Notes 1 – The fundamental iconographical studies are George Levitine, ‘Some Emblematic Sources of Goya’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 22 (1959), pp. 106–31, and his ‘Literary Sources of Goya's Capricho 43’, Art Bulletin, 37 (1955), pp. 56–9; Folke Nordström, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the Art of Goya (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1962, pp. 116–32); Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Eleanor A. Sayre, eds, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), pp. 110–7; Victor I. Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch, Goya: The Last Carnival (London: Reaktion, 1999), pp. 165–83. 2 – Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964). 3 – Levitine, ‘Emblematic Sources’, p. 130; Levitine, ‘Literary’, p. 57. 4 – Nordström, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 116–32. 5 – Leon Battista Alberti, in El tratado de la pintura por Leonardo de Vinci, y los tres libros que sobre el mismo arte escribió Leon Bautista Alberti, trans. Diego Antonio Rejón de Silva (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1784), p. 238. As pointed out by Andrew Schulz, ‘The Expressive Body in Goya's Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent’, Art Bulletin, 80 (1998), p. 669. See also Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, reprint 1980), pp. 61–71. 6 – Sarah Symmons, Goya: A Life in Letters (London: Pimlico), p. 252. 7 – Symmons, Goya, p. 253. 8 – Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson, The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya (New York: Reynal and William Morrow, 1971), cat. no. 1446. 9 – Barbara Kornmeier,‘ “Ydioma universal” — Goyas Taubstummenalphabet im Kontext seines Geniekonzepts’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 61 (1998), pp. 1–17. 10 – Sánchez and Sayre, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, pp. 110–2. 11 – Martin Warnke, ‘Goyas Gesten’, in Goya ‘Alle Warden Fallen’, ed. Werner Hofmann, Edith Helman, and Martin Warnke (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1987), pp. 115–77; Eleanor A. Sayre, ‘Goyas, Gebärdensprache’, in Goya: Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik exh. cat. (Frankfurt am Main: Städtische Galerie, 1981), pp. 82–7; Antonio Gascón Ricao, ‘Las cifras de la mano de Francisco de Goya’, Boletino del Museo e Instituto Camon Aznar, 82 (2000), pp. 273–84; Roberto Alcalá Flecha, ‘Expresion y gesto en la obra de Goya’, Goya, 252 (1996), pp. 341–52. For the multivalent meaning of Goya's gestures, see Reva Wolf, Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 1730 to 1850 (Boston: Boston College Museum of Art, 1991), p. 69; Werner Hofmann, ‘Unending Shipwreck’, in Goya: Truth and Fantasy, The Small Paintings, ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau and Manuela B. Mena Marqués (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 54. 12 – Flecha, ‘Expresion y gesto en la obra de Goya’, pp. 344–6, interprets this gesture in several works by Goya as desolation and anguish. 13 – These quotations are from the adaptation of Engel's instructions to English drama by Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (London, Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1822), p. 180. On the importance of Engel, see Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 86–7. 14 – The title and concept of Gilbert Adison's Chironomia of 1806 (which includes the intertwined fingers) are heavily inspired by Bulwer's treatise. See John Bulwer, Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (London, 1644), ed. James W. Cleary (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), pp. xxxi–xxxiv. The Czech engineer Jacob Leupold copied in 1727 Bulwer's chirogrammatic plates: Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 197–206. 15 – ‘Ploro’ is Bulwer/Cleary, gesture III, pp. 32–3, illustrated in plate C, p. 115; ‘Dolebit’ is gesture XXXVII, p. 187, illustrated in plate Y, p. 193; ‘Tristitia animi signo’ is gesture X, p. 39, illustrated in plate K, p. 115 (italics are original). 16 – Isabelle de Ramaix, The Illustrated Bartsch (New York: Abaris, 2006), vol. 71, part 1, figure 180. 17 – Nordström, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 122–3, figures 63 and 64. 18 – Bulwer/Cleary, gesture IX, p. 37, illustrated in plate I, p. 115. Engel refers to this gesture as denoting the state of being ‘unlucky’ and does not mention melancholy although he comments on this gesture in the paragraph on the intertwined fingers. 19 – The lovesick melancholic with folded arms was described frequently by English authors: Shakespeare's Love's Labour Lost III, i, Samuel Rowlands's The Melancholie Knight, and a satirical couplet describing the dramatist John Ford. See William R. Mueller, ‘Robert Burton's Frontispiece’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 64 (1949), pp. 1078–88; Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660 (London, Henley, and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 197–8. 20 – On melancholy, see Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy; Stanely W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 78–103; Laurinda S. Dixon, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 197–207; Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 21 – For example, Dixon, Perilous Chastity, pp. 57–70, explores how the body semiotics of sick women in seventeenth-century Flemish painting became a visual text of their medical condition. Female patients indicate their melancholy and distress by intertwining their fingers, a code that supposedly assists the physician in the scene in diagnosing his patient's disease as hysteria, a uterine disorder. A useful catalog of melancholy imagery is Jean Clair, ed., Melancholie: Genie und Wahnsinn in der Kunst, exh. cat. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), which includes the Yard with Lunatics (p. 314) and the first version of The Sleep of Reason (p. 420) with no reference to the gestures. 22 – Nordström, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 130; Paul Ilie, The Age of Minerva: Counter-Rational Reason in the Eighteenth Century: Goya and the Paradigm of Unreason in Western Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 114. 23 – Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 50–67; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, pp. 128–30. 24 – There may be a secondary reason for the excessive imagination expressed in the sleeper's body. Eighteenth-century physicians and philosophers argued that other than the dreamer's psyche, images experienced during sleep are instigated by physiology (indigestion), psychology (extreme fear or rage), and anything that would stimulate or excite the nervous system. Among the most common causes that excite dreams is the uneasy posture of the body. Jennifer Ford, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Pains of Sleep’, History Workshop Journal, 48 (1999), pp. 172–4; Roy Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 58; Clark, Vanities of the Eye, pp. 58–9. The configuration of Goya's sleeper is awkward and contrived: the lower body is frontal while the upper body rotates so that the head and hands reach the table, leaving an awkward gap between the table and the body. This imperfect and unnatural sleeping is a ground for the emergence of nightmares. 25 – Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, p. 124. 26 – Richard Baxter, The Practical Works of Richard Baxter (London, George Virtue, 1838), vol. 1, p. 261. 27 – For this drawing, see Sánchez and Sayre, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, pp. 119–23. 28 – Samuel Butler, Characters, 1659, quoted in Clark, Vanities of the Eye, p. 56. 29 – Levitine, ‘Emblematic’, pp. 115, 119. 30 – For analogous cases in Italian works, where the void is the artist's space of imagination and creativity, see Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 48–50; her Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 368–70; David Summers, ‘Form and Gender’, in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 386–88. 31 – Sánchez and Sayre, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, p. 114; Stoichita and Coderch, Goya, pp. 170–1. 32 – Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, eds, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 223. 33 – Six bullfight scenes and six pictures with diverse subjects: Commedia dell'arte, fire, shipwreck, bandits, and prison. For the series, see Wilson-Bareau and Mena Marqués, Goya, pp. 189–209. 34 – Symmons, Goya, p. 238. 35 – Gassier and Wilson, The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya, Appendix IV, p. 382. For the meanings of the word capricho, see Paul Ilie, ‘Capricho/Caprichoso: A Glossary of Eighteenth-Century Spanish Usages’, Hispanic Review, 44 (1976), pp. 239–55; John Dowling, ‘Capricho as Style in Life, Literature, and Art from Zamora to Goya’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1977), pp. 413–33; Andrew Schulz, Goya's ‘Caprichos’: Aesthetic, Perception, and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 185–93. 36 – Jane Kromm, ‘Goya and the Asylum at Saragossa’, The Social History of Medicine, 1 (1988), pp. 79–89. 37 – On the scene's theatricality, see Janis A. Tomlinson, Francisco Goya: The Tapestry Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 223; Jane Kromm, The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500–1850 (London and New York, Continuum, 2002), pp. 195–6. 38 – Peter K. Klein, ‘Insanity and the Sublime: Aesthetics and Theories of Mental Illness in Goya's Yard with Lunatics and Related Works’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 61 (1998), pp. 216–7, with elaboration in his ‘ “La fantasía abandonada de la razón”: Zur Darstellung des Wahnsinns in Goyas “Hof der Irren” ’, in Goya: Neue Forschungen. Das internationale Symposium 1991 in Osnabrück, ed. Jutta Held (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1994), pp. 161–94. The medical treatises are Esquirol's Dictionnaire des sciences medicales of 1816 and Des maladies mentales of 1838. 39 – Klein, ‘Insanity’, p. 217. Reading the painting metaphorically as a mirror of society, Tomlinson, Francisco Goya, pp. 223–4, proposes Giuseppe Maria Mitelli's Cage of Fools (1684) as a possible source for Yard with Lunatics and identifies the two men fighting with daggers at the bottom of the cage as an inspiration for Goya's wrestlers. 40 – Gassier and Wilson, cat. nos. 1382, 1401, 1443, 1481, 1492, 1500, 1653. 41 – Allan Ingram, Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1998), pp. 80, 127. 42 – Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, p. 258. 43 – Ibid., p. 259. 44 – Ibid., p. 256. 45 – Wolf, Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, pp. 5, 9, 12. 46 – For the influence of Hogarth's series of A Rake's Progress on Goya, see Wolf, Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, pp. 70, 74. Sander L. Gilman, Seeing the Insane: A Cultural History of Madness and Art in the Western World (New York: John Willey, 1982, reprint, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), does not discuss the intertwined fingers as a melancholy gesture, though numerous images in his book display it: a central figure in Louis Léopold Boilly's illustration of 35 heads exemplifying medical physiognomy (p. 71), the heroine of a British folk ballad who became a standard figure of love melancholy, Crazy Kate (p. 127), and a scene of a madhouse (p. 139), all of which are from the first half of the nineteenth century. 47 – Kromm, Art of Frenzy, p. 120. 48 – Kendon, Gesture, pp. 86–7. 49 – At the turn of the century, scientific studies codified a set of physiognomic and body characters as signs of insanity. The French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel, in his 1800 Treatise of Insanity, employs Johann Caspar Lavater's quasi-scientific physiognomic theory (1781–1786) in his analysis of the facial characteristics and physical structures of the insane as a means for diagnosing mental illness. Gilman, Seeing the Insane, pp. 72–82. 50 – The delusion, a major symptom of madness (Kromm, Art of Frenzy, pp. 118–9), may be implied in Yard with Lunatics by the glaring light in the upper zone, which, in its geometrical form and juxtaposition with darkness, is somewhat reminiscent of the crescent-shape void in the second version of The Sleep of Reason. 51 – It is worth noting that the sleeper's seated position with crossed legs, seen in all versions, perpetuates the long-lasting body rhetoric of the melancholic and the quiescent intellectual (Nordström, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 19), as also viewed in Goya's portrait of Jovellanos. This body arrangement underscores the paradoxical condition of the melancholic: the hand gesture denotes mental anxiety, while the crossed legs denote physical repose. For such contrast, see Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion, 1995), pp. 192–3. 52 – Sánchez and Sayre, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, pp. 110–1. Inscribed on the scroll next to the sleeping melancholic Quevedo is the title of his work, Los Sueños, which influenced Goya. 53 – Plates 9, 24, 26, 28 (combined with holding a staff), 46, 57, 58, 59, 63 (twice), and less explicitly in plates 23, 47, 52, 53. 54 – Hanna Hohl, ‘Giuseppe Maria Mitellis “Alfabeto in sogno” und Francisco de Goya “Sueño de la razón” ’, in Museum und Kunst: Beiträge für Alfred Hentzen, ed. Hans Werner Grohn and Wolf Stubbe (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 1970), pp. 109–18. 55 – Stoichita and Coderch, Goya, p. 174; Ilie, The Age of Minerva, vol. 1, pp. 4–5. 56 – Quoted in Stoichita and Coderch, Goya, p. 288, my italics. 57 – Quoted in Sánchez and Sayre, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, p. 114. 58 – Goya opens the advertisement of the Caprichos by referring to the similarity between art and literature and the potential paragone between them. Nigel Glendinning, ‘The Universal Language of Goya's Caprichos’, in Printing the Unprintable: The Bicentenary of Goya's Caprichos, ed. Sarah Symmons (Essex, University of Essex and Palladian Press, 1999), pp. 17–29. 59 – Matthew Craske, Art in Europe 1700–1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 89–143, underscores the ideal of universal culture in eighteenth-century Europe and argues that Goya explores the deficiency of this idea. My argument, of course, shows the opposite. 60 – Bulwer/Cleary, p. 16. 61 – James R. Knowlson, ‘The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 26, no. 4 (1965), p. 506; Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 172–3. 62 – Kendon, Gesture, pp. 35–8. 63 – Knowlson, ‘The Idea of Gesture’, pp. 500–1. 64 – Nordström, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 127; Stoichita and Coderch, Goya, p. 183. 65 – Interestingly, José López-Rey, Goya's Caprichos: Beauty, Reason and Caricature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), vol. 1, pp. 81–4, associates Goya's ‘Ydioma universal’ with Lavatar's physiognomic theory. 66 – Stoichita and Coderch, Goya, pp. 175–83.
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