Painting fear, writing time: Goya and Mário Cláudio

Abstract

Beyond the narrow circle of art criticism, the late phase of Goya's painting, which corresponds to the last years of his life, has already aroused the interest of biographers, novelists and filmmakers. In stark contrast to the noble portraits, gallant parties and mild tapestry motifs that Goya produced throughout his career, his work would incorporate, in old age, the phantasmagoria, the grotesque, the unusual. Cloistered at “Quinta del Sordo”, the painter would cover his home walls with monstrous figures, demons and witches, projecting into the familiar space an authentic iconography of horror. From these images and around them, Mario Claudio recreates the end of Goya's life, transfigured into D. Francisco, in the fiction novel Gémeos (2004). Through a character our contemporary, an art scholar who specializes in Goya’s painting and is unexpectedly affected by it, the intimate drama of a man in his confrontation with time and finitude is revealed, being staged especially in the ambiguous relationship established between D. Francisco and Rosarito, his stepdaughter: young, perverse and seductive – reflection or inspiration of the shadows on the walls, causing simultaneous desire and frustration, love and hate, fascination and fear. It is the mode of representation of these dualities what we are interested in investigating, in text and image, in this paper.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/abriluff.2017n19a419