Author: Matthew Davis / Source: Big Think
- The Black Paintings stand out in art history for the dark composition and themes.
- The biggest mystery, though, is that Goya painted them directly onto the walls of his home and never told anybody about them.
- With such little information, all we can do is speculate about the 14 horrifying Black Paintings.
By 1819, the painter Francisco Goya had been through quite a bit. He had witnessed the chaos of war when Napoleon invaded Spain and the chaos in Spain as its government bounced back and forth between a constitutional monarchy and an absolute monarchy. He had become deathly ill a number of times, occasionally fearing he was going mad. One of these illnesses had left him deaf. Increasingly bitter about humanity, afraid of death and madness, Goya withdrew into a villa outside of Madrid called la Quinta del Sordo, or the Deaf Man’s House.
In the villa, Goya would go on to paint some of his darkest and strangest works. They were painted directly on the walls of the house, and Goya didn’t mention them to anybody as far as we can tell. They were pessimistic paintings that differed wildly from his earlier works, apparently created for his own sake. He never named them, but art historians have given descriptive titles to the works. Collectively, they are known as the Black Paintings.
The tenebrous meaning of the Black Paintings
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Two Old Men
The 14 Black Paintings are almost invariably painted with dark colors — they’re not called the Hot Pink Paintings after all. The human figures are painted in an expressionistic style that depicts humans as pseudo-monsters, like the blurred, deformed faces in Women Laughing or the whispering goblinoid in Two Old Men. Goya had seen the cruelty that human beings inflicted on one another, and the faces of his human subjects reflect this interior monstrosity.
Aside from this, interpreting many of the Black Paintings is challenging. Goya hadn’t intended to display them publicly and offered no explanation of their subjects. Many of the paintings’ backgrounds are morphing shades of black or brown, lacking details we could use to orient ourselves, and even the titles are the inventions of art historians.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Duel with Cudgels
The painting with the clearest meaning, Duel with Cudgels, shows two peasants fighting each other with their legs stuck in a quagmire, unable to escape from one another except by beating their…
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