Self Portrait, by Francisco de Goya
Credit: Hulton Fine Art Collection
They are some of the most disturbing paintings in the history of art. In one, a man scuttles from the darkness. His eyes are wild, popping with paranoia. In his hands is a headless corpse – his son, cannibalised. Dark blood pours from his mouth. In another, two peasants, bodies poised in combat, cudgels swinging, are ready to bludgeon each other to death. Then there is the image of a tiny dog, its head dwarfed by a massive swoosh of water, about to slip beneath the waves and drown.
Francisco de Goya, who was born 275 years ago this year, made the so-called Black Paintings, including the notorious Saturn Devouring His Son, between 1819 and 1823. He daubed them directly onto the walls of his house in the suburbs of Madrid called Quinta del Sordo, the house of the deaf man. By this time the artist was stone-deaf and blackly depressed: he had witnessed famine, revolution, political turbulence, war and the dea