Church displays Goya's best

By T.J. McNAMARA

It is inescapable: other museums may have wonderful paintings by Francisco Goya but to appreciate the full range of his genius you must go to Madrid, to the great museum of the Prado.

Like a colossus, Spain's greatest painter bestrides the time before the French Revolution and the confused modern world that came after.

The Prado contains the lovely works Goya painted early in his life as designs for the royal tapestry factory. They show all the variety of life in Spain and are in their own way as rococo as anything done for Madame de Pompadour.

Yet Goya, the rough, tough, brawling son of a gilder from the north of Spain, added a sinister edge that is particularly his own.

Then came catastrophe. The Napoleonic armies invaded Spain, occupied Madrid and the long Peninsular War began, with Spanish guerrillas fighting alongside British armies led by the Duke of Wellington. The war was notable for its atrocities and Goya saw them and recorded them in the first documentary paintings and etchings.

Prominent in the Prado is his painting of the night of May 3, 1808, when French reprisals led to the shooting of civilians in Madrid. It is a painting so powerful it is hard to look at.

Other terrifying things followed. The ageing Goya, deaf as a result of severe illness, embittered by the wreckage of his affair with the beautiful Duchess of Alba, retreated to his house, the House of the Deaf Man, and painted on the walls his Black Paintings, full of demons, witches, ghouls, and the brutality of men and gods.

All this and much more is to be seen in the Prado, including his amazing, frank portraits of the Spanish royal family. Here and at the Academy of San Fernando you can see Goya's work in its true size and appreciate close-up the astonishing confidence and attack of his brushwork. Colour reproductions will give a fair idea of the nature of his achievement.

But there is one place with works by Goya that can never be photographed adequately.

It is a little church called the Hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida near the River Manzanares that runs by Madrid. The entire interior was covered with frescos by Goya in 1798.

For many years the works were inaccessible because they were under restoration. In four or five visits to Madrid I had never been able to see them. One Sunday morning I finally managed it, though some of the scaffolding was still in place.

The Manzanares is not much of a river. In Goya's time it was a meandering stream used by washerwomen. Now it is confined between stone embankments and has curious little refuges for ducks and swans. It was once countryside and even today there are many trees and pleasant walks along the river.

The church is in the shape of a Greek cross and is now the last resting place of Goya himself.

His bones were placed here under a simple slab when they were brought back from Bordeaux in France 100 years after the painter died in self-imposed exile.

The church is a museum. In 1927 the government built an identical church across the road for the regular church-goers of the parish.

Inside the church, designed by the architect Felipe Fontana in 1792, the curved walls and the dome are entirely covered with Goya's frescos. Frescos are paintings done directly into wet plaster so they become part of the wall. The word suggests the precision and clarity of Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling or Raphael's paintings in the Vatican, but Goya's frescos are quite different.

There are no lines. They are full of flickering colour and silvery light and were painted with wide brushes and sometimes with sponges on the end of a pole. Goya covered the entire area in less than four months.

The central dome of the church is the main picture. Goya chose to represent a miracle by St Anthony of Padua, one of Europe's favourite saints. St Anthony was born in Lisbon in 1195 and died in Padua and, among many other things, was notable for preaching to the fishes.

St Anthony was in Italy when he knew instinctively his father was in trouble, accused of murder because a body had been dumped over his garden wall.

The saint miraculously transported himself from Italy to Portugal. He had the grave opened and the body of the murdered man sat up and declared his father innocent. The saint then transported himself back to Italy.

Goya shows this miracle in a special way. Around the dome he painted a railing. In one part of the dome behind the railing St Anthony revives the corpse. All around the railing is a mass of nearly 100 intensely alive figures dressed in the clothes of the artist's time.

They are a lively cross-section of society in Madrid, from beggars to aristocracy. Urchins with their legs over the railing look as if they are in danger of falling into the church.

That is not all. Around the dome on every curving arch supporting it there are angels and cherubs holding back curtains that reveal the central scene.

In the past there was much debate whether angels were male or female.

Goya's angels are undoubtedly female, and voluptuous young women at that. They are full of life and painted with an astonishing flickering virtuosity. Their wings flutter like the wings of colourful butterflies.

There is no other fresco in the world like it, but no one ever painted anything quite like Goya.