GOYA y su tiempo

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Goya, is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical conflicts of Spain’ssociety and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters all over the world. Goya is often referred to as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. The times in which Goya lived and painted stretched from 1765 until the years after the Peninsular War. During much of that period, Spain was undergoing political, intellectual, and social changes.

During this course, we’ll learn and interpret the different intellectual, artistic, and pictorial trends, styles and sensibilities that had an impact on Goya’s work. These artistic influences began with late Baroque and Rococo, then followed by Neoclassicism, detectable in paintings during the reign of Charles IV, and ended with a nascent Romanticism in which only Goya participated in the closing years of the century. We’ll also discuss how Goya was strongly influenced by the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that originated in France in the mid-18th century.Finally, we’ll analyze the dramatic historical and social context of Spain at that time which included the French invasion, the War of independence and the decadence of the Spanish Empire.