Part 2.13  Another instance of Goya’s ability to reveal the truth about the human condition

What follows in the remaining sections of Part 2 are further examples of how fearful of the truth of our horrifically soul-corrupted condition the human race has been, and as a result, how determinedly we have presented a human-condition-denying representation of ourselves. And also how honest and exposing of all that dishonesty a very rare few people in history have been—like Sir Laurens van der Post, Plato, Nikolai Berdyaev, R.D. Laing, Michael Leunig, Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Francisco Goya, Vincent van Gogh, William Blake, Bob Dylan, and the other presenters of honest representations of the human condition that are included in this book.

To refer to Goya again (see paragraph 187), in addition to his etching The sleep of reason brings forth monsters, he also painted two contrasting representations of a famous festival in Spain, one denying the human condition and the other revealing it. The esteemed Australian TIME magazine art critic, Robert Hughes, described these pictures in his 2002 documentary Goya: Crazy Like A Genius: ‘There are two paintings of the same subject…​[They are of] a big religious festival, that of St. Isidro. On that day thousands of citizens, in their Sunday best, converged on a pilgrimage chapel outside Madrid and had a picnic.’ In the first representation titled ‘St. Isidro’s Meadow’ [below], Hughes said, ‘the girls are in their white parasols, the men in their finery, the scene is of social pleasure and jollity’.

Goya’s St. Isidro’s Meadow (detail), 1788

Then, according to Hughes, ‘Thirty years later Goya returned to the same theme. In this picture [below, titled]…​The Pilgrimage of St. Isidro, instead of these happy fashionable well-dressed young people, you have this horrible snake of…​dark figures…​like demons crawling across an ash heap. The faces are…​of madmen and hysterics…​The whole picture is deeply threatening’.

Goya’s The Pilgrimage of St. Isidro (detail), 1821-1823

While Hughes wasn’t sound and secure enough to go beyond saying ‘The faces are…​of madmen and hysterics’ and recognise that Goya was depicting the horrifically soul-corrupted state of our human condition, Goya clearly knew humanity was living a completely fraudulent, human-condition-denying, escapist, deluded existence. Accompanying his etching, Capricho 6, he even wrote that ‘The world is a masquerade. Looks, dress and voice, everything is only pretension. Everyone wants to appear to be what he is not. Everyone is deceiving, and no one ever knows himself.’ So Goya was an extremely bold, human-condition-confronting, prophetic, truthful thinker.