(3 of 3)
Perhaps the most moving of these -- a Spanish equivalent, in its effort to embody intellect, of David's portrait of the Lavoisiers -- is his 1798 portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the outstanding thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, a much-exiled man who briefly held state office as the Minister of Religion and Justice under Carlos IV. Goya shows him at an ornate desk in the Madrid palace, lost in melancholy thought amid props that seem out of scale with his modesty.
It cannot be an accident that Goya adapted Jovellanos' pose for the dreaming figure in The Sleep of Reason. He had no illusions about the distance between liberal hope and the possibility of its fulfillment. But even though present-day Republicans and their flacks have corrupted the American air with babblings about the L word, as though liberalism were something to be ashamed of, Goya's beliefs, so passionately held, still testify to the liberal conscience as the best hope of Western man in the past 200 years.