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But only a modernist reading of the artist's role makes it seem contradictory that Goya was both a court artist and an inspired, tragic social critic. Efforts to see him in pop-Marxist terms as "an artist of the people" miss the point. Goya had many disillusioned moments, and by the last years of his life, when -- sick and old and bitterly disappointed by the betrayal of the liberal Spanish constitution at the hands of that squat reactionary King, Fernando VII -- he moved to France, they became a continuous pessimism. He never idealized the Spanish proletariat: it was el populacho, the 18th century "mob," a many-headed beast capable of every atrocity and stupidity as well as sublime moments of collective courage.
Had he been asked, amid the intellectual and political convulsions that tore Spain asunder between 1790 and 1815, "Whose side are you on?", he would have answered, "Reason's." For Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, the gilder's son from Aragon, did not have the education of a Diderot or a Rousseau, but he was completely a figure of the Enlightenment; his paintings and prints, with their obsessive imagery of the conflict of light and darkness, are perhaps its supreme metaphorical expression in European art outside of the classically formalized work of Jacques-Louis David.
But what they do not possess -- especially not the Caprichos and the Disasters of War -- is the sense of intellectual decorum and poise that the well-born, French-reading illuminati of Madrid preferred the discourse of images to have. Goya was not good at optimistic allegory. His large painting of the adoption of the liberal constitution of 1812 -- the constitution as a maiden in white presented by Father Time while pretty Clio, the muse of history, takes notes -- is one of his few real pictorial failures.
Moral reflection, in Goya's prints and not a few of his paintings, moves from being a philosophical exercise into a sort of frenzy, a despairing assault on a world of terminal evil. Greed, whoring, pederasty, witchcraft and the religious bigotry that was its mirror image, the brutality of the low and the myopic arrogance of the high, and above all the limitless cruelties inflicted in the name of orthodoxy (by the Inquisition) and political conquest (by the invading French and their guerrilla opponents): these possess him as they have possessed no other artist before or since. Seen through his encyclopedic vision of folly and cruelty, Goya's Spain is more like Dean Swift's Ireland than Voltaire's Europe.
Some of the best of the portraits in which Goya celebrated the nation's distinguished liberals are also in the show. There is his impressive if slightly servile early image of Floridablanca, Prime Minister to the liberal Carlos III and, by 1808, head of the Junta Central that organized opposition to the invading French armies. There is his group portrait of the Osuna family, who held freethinking tertulias (discussion groups) in their ducal palace to which Goya came, along with the best writers and wits in Madrid. From the Countess of Chinchon, pregnant, dithering and infinitely vulnerable in her misty white mass of sprigged muslin, to the level, sagacious gaze of his friend the art collector Sebastian Martinez, Goya left on record an extraordinary sequence of human presences.