Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment

The great Spanish painter Francisco Goya has long been considered an artist of the Enlightenment who took a heroic stance against the forces of political oppression, and critics have read his art as a reflection of his renegade ideas. In this book Janis A. Tomlinson offers a fresh and innovative interpretation of the major paintings of Goya's mid-career, disentangling the historic Goya from the romanticized Goya and placing his works in the context of the ideological, social, and artistic changes of the times.

Tomlinson examines the social history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain from the outbreak of the French Revolution and its effect on Spain through the restoration of Spain's Bourbon monarchy in 1814. She discusses such well-known works by Goya as the Family of Carlos IV, the Maja vestida and the Maja desnuda, and the Second of May and Third of May, reassessing them in relation to Goya's changing patrons: Carlos IV and María Luisa, the court favorite Manuel Godoy, the rulers of the interim regimes of the Napoleonic years, Fernando VII, and, finally, the broader public characterized by its alienation from a conservative restoration regime. Emphasizing the complexity of the context that engendered these paintings, Tomlinson demonstrates that any reading of Goya's works must acknowledge the unique circumstances of their patronage and ideology in a period of transition and ambivalence.