Goya is undoubtedly an oil writer. What the Aragonese genius was able to capture in his paintings today becomes an adventure to enjoy, halfway between Don Quixote and the Bohemian Lights.
It is about the History of Spain from the privileged eyes of the creator, whose hands and brushes transmit emotions and awaken them in a XNUMXth or XNUMXst century viewer.
When it is not about overwhelming compositions of large dimensions, we find the Goya of stories, of engravings as immortal moments made to etching.
And for each creative period it leaves that trace of change, of the variable emotions that overwhelm us according to the circumstances. The portrait of Spain with its light and dark, with its brightness and deformities typical of the transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
It is not surprising, then, how interesting this book The Last Portrait of Goya seems to me, with its intention of providing portraits of one of the universal creators, especially for its ability to synthesize and always maintain the imprint of the essentially human in the artistic creation.
Summary: During the long period of chaos that marked the leap of centuries between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries in Spain, at a time of political upheaval and patriotic wars, Francisco de Goya had to earn his living as a court painter, making family portraits royal and aristocracy. But his most important portrait may not be any of them, but the phenomenal altarpiece that his drawings and engravings make up, to the point of painting the monstrous and upset face of his time.
The last portrait of Goya It is inspired by various episodes in the artist's life. It is, so to speak, a series of dialogues with a high iconographic content, the antithesis of a "period comedy." The authors, responding to Goya's inventive genius and tremendous expressiveness, draw a portrait of the painter that places him in his time without ceasing to present him to us as a man who speaks to us from the present, as if he had known our current problems, such as If I had painted the future
You can now buy the book The Last Portrait of Goya, by John Berger and Nella Bielski, here: