2024 № 3 (50)
Image and Mask in the Painting by Francisco Goya: The Ontological and Axiological Aspects
UDC 7.03
LBC 85.03(4)/85.03(8); 85пр2 52
DOI: 10.51678/2226-0072-2024-3-12-65
For cit.: Loukitcheva Krassimira L. Image and Mask in the Painting by Francisco Goya: The Ontological and Axiological Aspects. Hudozhestvennaya kul’tura [Art & Culture Studies], 2024, no. 3, pp. 12-65. https://doi.org/10.51678/2226-0072-2024-3-12-65.
Loukitcheva Krassimira L.
PhD (in Art History), Assistant Professor, Senior Researcher, Classical Western Art Department, State Institute for Art Studies, 5 Kozitsky Lane, Moscow, 125375, Russia
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2731-2824
ResearcherID: KLD-5406-2024
Image and Mask in the Painting by Francisco Goya: The Ontological and Axiological Aspects
Abstract. It is widely recognized that F. Goya’s development of a picturesque manner is in the vein of his great predecessors — El Greco and D. Velázquez. However, with all the importance of the experimental novelty of this Spanish master’s technique, the uniqueness of his creativity should be sought elsewhere. Goya managed to decidedly push the established boundaries of the European art expanding its range with the themes and problems that had previously been rarely and poorly represented. Anticipating an existential and anthropological shift that was evident back in the last decades of the 19th century and being almost a century ahead of it, those themes, plots, and problems were aimed at exteriorizing the inner world of man on the scale that appears to have never existed before. Goya systematically examines the human psyche in extreme existential situations when the conscious and the subconscious intertwine in a whimsical way. The specific feature of this perspective is an interest not in the individual and individuality but in the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness, as C. Jung would later justify it. The master’s true goal is to break through to where the archetypal components of the psyche, thinking, and behaviour rest.
In this sense, the images of the mentally disturbed and the imprisoned become semantically significant, the atmosphere of madhouses and prisons, the world of human imagination that engendered the sphere of the irrational. Goya seeks the truth about man scrutinizing him in extreme situations and critical states. The artist often approaches the visualization of all this through a theatrical element — through masks, role-playing, and games. He is interested in that harsh inversion where a person, put into inhuman, unbearable conditions, can no longer to remain rational and turns into a dreadful, meaningless human mask. The main characteristics of the artist’s approach are explored in comparison with thematically similar works by William Hogarth, Henry Fuseli, and Théodore Géricault.
Keywords: Fransisco Goya, Spanish culture, archetypical characters, otherworld, unconscious, Carl Gustav Jung, William Hogarth, Henry Fuseli, Théodore Géricault
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Received 04.06.2024
Accepted 01.07.2024
