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Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment
Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez & Eleanor A. Sayre
*Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment* is the substantial catalogue of a landmark 1988-89 exhibition that traveled from the Prado in Madrid to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Directed by Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Eleanor A. Sayre, it sets Francisco Goya - the towering Spanish painter and printmaker who bridged the courtly eighteenth century and the dark modern nineteenth - against the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment that shaped his world. Beyond the many plates of paintings, drawings, and prints, its essays examine Goya's ties to reformist circles, to France, and to the ideals of reason and freedom that his art both celebrated and, in his bleaker moods, doubted. Scholarly but handsome, it remains a valuable reference. For anyone serious about Goya or about art at the hinge of the modern age, it is a rich resource.
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The subject
Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was the greatest Spanish artist of his era, court painter to the crown yet also the creator of the searing Caprichos and Disasters of War. His work registers the collision between Enlightenment hopes and the violence and reaction that followed.
The book
This catalogue accompanied the 1988-89 Prado-Met-MFA exhibition, co-directed by the Prado's Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and the MFA's Eleanor A. Sayre. Alongside extensive plates it collects scholarly essays placing Goya within the reformist, French-facing, Enlightenment culture of late-eighteenth-century Spain.
How to read it
Use it as both an exhibition record and a scholarly introduction: the essays frame Goya intellectually, while the catalogue entries reward close study of individual works.
For more context
Pair it with Robert Hughes's biography Goya, or the MFA's later Goya: Order and Disorder, for other routes into the artist.
Sources
- Type
- Exhibition catalog
- Author / Maker
- Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez & Eleanor A. Sayre
- Publisher
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Year
- 1989
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado