The Paintings You Aren't Supposed to See

The Paintings You Aren’t Supposed to See

Source: The Paintings You Aren’t Supposed to See, Horses, 24:15, uploaded 2024-05-29.

Francisco Goya’s fourteen Black Paintings were large murals on the walls of his home. They were private works with no known titles, commissions, or explanation from the artist. Goya left almost no record of their existence, yet the paintings show cannibalism, witchcraft, warped faces, failing bodies, and a dog disappearing beneath a dark slope. Horses follows the common reading of these works as the result of an artist descending into madness, then finds that account too simple to explain either the paintings or the person who made them.

The political and bodily conditions behind the paintings

Goya was born in 1746 in Fuendetodos, Spain, and became a celebrated painter who received commissions from the Spanish royal family. His success placed him inside a political conflict that he could not escape. After the French Revolution began in 1789, the Spanish government tried to suppress its sympathisers. Goya supported the left-leaning revolutionaries whilst depending on commissions from the Crown. The divided position did not create the Black Paintings by itself, although it gave the later works a political and moral background.

In 1793 an illness left Goya deaf. The loss of hearing was followed by a severe depressive episode, and his work began to focus on suffering and cruelty. The 1794 Yard with Lunatics shows people inside a mental institution beneath a bright sky. The building appears to stand in daylight, yet the figures remain in darkness. The painting gives the video an early example of the distance between the world outside a person and the world that illness creates within them.

Spain entered civil war after Ferdinand VII took power. Goya tried to leave Madrid twice, although officials threatened to seize his property and remove him from his post. He stayed and lived in an awkward relation to the conflict. He painted for the invading king whilst Spanish generals asked him to document their soldiers’ suffering. During this period he made The Disasters of War, a series whose earliest dated entry comes from 1810. The prints refer to the Peninsular War, yet they leave out identifiable people, places, and events. They show the daily suffering of a population torn apart by violence, which lets Goya treat war as a human failure rather than a dispute over which side holds the just cause.

The series became a bridge to the Black Paintings. As Spain grew more oppressive and Goya’s health declined, he bought a country house. He fell seriously ill again in 1819 and spent the rest of his life fearing a relapse and an approaching death. The video places the beginning of the Black Paintings after this illness, although the date remains uncertain. X-rays later showed pleasant scenes of nature and country life beneath the dark murals. Historians cannot say with certainty whether Goya painted those earlier scenes. The change still suggests a deliberate covering of an idyllic world with images of fear and decay.

The Black Paintings do not record identifiable events. They give form to a mood and to Goya’s inner state as political violence, illness, and death pressed upon him. That claim remains an interpretation. Goya supplied no explanation, and even the paintings’ present titles came from historians after his death.

Saturn and the danger of a fixed meaning

Saturn Devouring His Son is the most famous of the fourteen works. The classical story tells of Kronos, later called Saturn by the Romans, who eats his children because he fears that one of them will overthrow him. Earlier depictions by Peter Paul Rubens and by Goya himself show Saturn as a recognisable monster. The earlier Goya drawing also gives the figure two bodies, as though the act follows a deliberate procedure.

The later mural gives Saturn a different face. He looks frightened as he stares towards the viewer, as though someone has caught him in the act. The viewer fears the monster, whilst the monster appears horrified by himself. His victim has already lost its head and most of its body. The bright figure stands in a spotlight against the black background, which makes the scene feel interrupted rather than staged as a mythological tableau.

The painting also departs from the story assigned to it. Saturn eats a newborn child in the myth, although the body in Goya’s mural appears adult and may even be female. The painting lacks the usual signs of Saturn, such as an hourglass, a scythe, or other references to time. Since Goya never named the work, the title itself remains a theory. The subject could be Saturn, although the evidence leaves room for another figure and another story.

One possible reading connects the image to Goya’s son Javier. Goya and his wife lost nearly all of their children, with accounts ranging from four deaths to as many as nineteen. Javier was the only child to survive childhood. Goya doted on him, wrote warmly about him, gave him much of his property after his wife’s death, and continued to spend money on him even after Javier married into a wealthy family. Goya hoped that his son would become an artist. A portrait of Javier at twenty-one shows a handsome young man who looks pretty, aloof, and sheltered. He appears dependent rather than determined.

The mural might register Goya’s disappointment with Javier or his grief for the children he lost. Such a reading makes the image specific in a way that the painting itself cannot support. The lack of a title and the absence of an explanation matter. Goya’s work keeps its force partly because it refuses to settle into one private anecdote.

Witchcraft, grotesque faces, and ordinary darkness

In Witches’ Sabbath, a goat who may represent Satan presides over a group of frightened witches. The smallest figure beside him may be a child prepared for a ritual. The witches have grotesque, twisted faces, although the scene offers little detail about the ritual or its setting. Goya had painted witchcraft before, and he opposed the Spanish Inquisition as a committed liberal. Historians often read the paintings as silent protests against the Inquisition. The Black Painting continues that protest whilst withholding a clear moral statement about the ritual itself.

Two Women and a Man shifts from myth and witchcraft to a crude domestic scene. A man appears to masturbate whilst two peasant women laugh or mock him. The black background removes any stable place from the scene, and Goya distorts every face until it becomes a grotesque version of an emotion. The painting turns an ordinary moment into something hard to name. Its humour, embarrassment, and menace occupy the same dark space.

The two figures in Two Old Men Eating Soup create a similar disturbance. One holds a spoon and grins widely. The other looks as though he may already be dead. A simple meal could become a charming domestic scene, yet the woman points towards something outside the frame and smiles beside a body that may be dying. The painting makes everyday life feel close to decay. Horses treats this as a recurring movement in the series, where Goya searches for darkness inside the common place rather than reserving horror for monsters.

In Pilgrimage to San Isidro, Goya revisits a scene he had painted in brighter colours, with attractive clothing and a sense of calm. Historians connect the new work to Saturnalia, a festival that should carry a festive mood. Goya fills it with despair and distress. Atropos returns to myth through the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, who control human life. Their bodies look gnarled and damaged as they carry a fourth body through the sky. The gods receive no reverence here. They look like agents of a process that has already begun to destroy the human figure.

The dog beneath the slope

The most moving work in the series may be The Drowning Dog. The title came after Goya’s death, and the painting has also been called The Dog, Head of a Dog, The Buried Dog, The Half-Drowned Dog, and The Half-Submerged Dog. Only the dog’s head remains visible above a large sloping mass. The composition gives the animal almost no space in which to move.

Art historians have read the dog as a figure engaged in a losing struggle against the world. The animal can also stand for the individual confronting forces that exceed its control. Horses treats this reading as a thesis for the series, although the image remains too spare to prove a single interpretation. Goya was old, ill, and aware that death was approaching. The dark slope appears to press into the dog without offering an escape.

The painting’s power comes from its uncertainty. The viewer cannot tell whether the dog is drowning, buried, or simply trapped behind a hill. Its expression does not explain what it sees. The work turns the lack of information into part of the experience, which is why a blunt story about Goya’s mental state cannot contain it.

Illness without a diagnosis

Horses returns to the circumstances of Goya’s life before closing the argument. Ferdinand VII ruled as an oppressive and incompetent monarch, suppressed the liberal ideas Goya valued, and helped push Spain into civil war. Goya also suffered at least four major episodes of illness, in 1777, 1787, 1819, and 1828. The recorded symptoms include temporary paralysis, partial blindness, depression, nausea, dizziness, pain, and a general sense of sorrow. Historians have proposed several diagnoses, although the surviving evidence cannot establish one.

Laura L. Casey argues in “Goya: In Sickness and in Health” that the simplest account explains most of the symptoms. With the exception of deafness, she connects them to somatic depression, which affects the body as well as the mind. The etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters offers a possible visual parallel. A figure often taken to be Goya himself leans over a table whilst beasts and demons gather around him. The image may also work as an allegory for Spanish society, so it cannot settle the question of Goya’s personal illness.

His marriage and family life add further strain. Goya married María Josefa Bayeu, who had links to the royal family. Historians have suggested that the marriage gave him the protection he needed to paint and speak freely despite his politics. The relationship remained unhappy, and the couple lost nearly all of their children. Goya also faced repeated rejection early in his career, the hostility of Ferdinand’s court, and a civil war close to his home.

The video connects these pressures to Goya’s sensitivity as an artist. That connection needs care because it can turn suffering into a source of artistic genius. Horses presents Goya as unusually receptive to the world around him, which may have helped him represent both physical and mental pain. The same sensitivity could intensify what he experienced. Contemporaries remembered his violent outrage when he saw injustice and cruelty.

After his illness in 1819, Goya painted Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta. The doctor holds him up and offers him a tonic. His posture resembles a priest giving last rites, although the painting also serves as a gesture of thanks. Goya had little faith in Spanish physicians. People called doctors matasanos, loosely meaning “killers of the healthy”, and medical treatment often relied on bloodletting. Physicians explained physical illness through spiritual causes, which left Goya dependent on a system he considered corrupt and incompetent. His later years carried a constant expectation of death. He believed that it might arrive on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, since he had already outlived the life he expected to have.

The model aeroplane and the person behind the label

The Black Paintings offer no mechanical explanation. They have deteriorated, undergone extensive restoration, and acquired titles and interpretations after Goya’s death. Their scenes remain vague enough to support several readings whilst resisting a final one. Art communicates through the whole work, including the experiences that formed the person who made it.

Horses ends with a childhood memory. The narrator watched his grandfather build model aeroplanes with fine tools and great care. When people call someone crazy, he says, they can mistake a pile of separate parts for a finished object. Each piece has a function that disappears when the observer treats it as random material. Goya’s feelings, illnesses, political pressures, family losses, and artistic choices also have individual significance. Failing to understand how those parts fit together reveals the limits of the observer’s empathy.

The video leaves Goya as a sensitive and forceful person who responded to pain with work. His legacy gains little from the romantic image of an artist driven into madness. The Black Paintings remain reflections of human life inside and outside the body, and their uncertainty is part of what they preserve.

Limits

This note reconstructs Horses’ video from its complete English caption track, metadata, description, and the references named in the description. The captions contain frequent errors in names and words, so I corrected clear transcription mistakes such as Fuendetodos, María Josefa Bayeu, The Disasters of War, and Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The historical claims, diagnoses, restoration details, and interpretations remain claims presented by the video unless a source is cited directly.

The description names seven references, although only one is linked. The New York Times article was inaccessible during acquisition, so this note does not treat it as independently verified. The remaining references appear below as the sources Horses credits. The video does not establish that any one interpretation of the Black Paintings is Goya’s intended meaning, and the note keeps that uncertainty open.