Francisco de Goya
Seated Giant, By 1818 (possibly 1814–18), Burnished aquatint, scaper, roulette, lavis (along the top of the landscape and within the landscape), 284 x 208 mm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1935, 35.42, www.metmuseum.org
Fear Itself
Commentary by Rembrandt Duits
Europeans of the fifteenth and even of the seventeenth century might have related to the story of the spies confronted by giants in the Promised Land by thinking of voyages to, and exploration of, unknown places in the world; places where actual giants might live. By 1800, however, the unmapped areas of the globe had dramatically shrunk. At the same time, the early nineteenth century saw artists begin to abandon traditional themes such as ‘the four seasons’ and start to present more personal responses to the events of their time. They also experimented with techniques that allowed greater freedom of expression, such as the aquatint method, which changed printing from a line-based medium into one capable of more painterly nuances of light and shade.
All these trends seem to converge in the dramatic aquatint of a seated giant that the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828) made in the later decades of his life. Goya earned a reputation as a portraitist at the Spanish court but turned to darker subjects in his private works, especially in print, with his often nightmarish series of Capriccios and the gruesome Disasters of War, inspired by the Napoleonic Wars in Spain (1807–14).
The seated giant, although a standalone sheet rather than part of a sequence, belongs with these brooding reflections. It is often thought the dark titan resting on the horizon of a moonlit landscape represents the threat of war, but it is equally possible that Goya created an associative image out of blotches (a bit like a Rorschach Test) when playing around with the aquatint medium.
One could argue that the reading of the print as a warning against war is almost too directly allegorical. What is striking is the vagueness and the lack of identifiable features. The landscape consists of blurry, imprecise shapes; the giant himself is a shadowy figure merging with the dusk. This is not a giant who inhabits a specific geographical location but one who looms in the half-light of a liminal space, resting on the border between night and day, and between this world and the next. In a sense, Goya sublimely sums up how giants became transformed from supposedly real, if unverified, dangers in foreign lands (as in Numbers 13) to creatures of the imagination, the embodiment of our own fears.
References
Ives, Colta. 2000. ‘The Printed Image in the West: Aquatint’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
MacDonald, Mark (ed.). 2021. Goya’s Graphic Imagination (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
