Nadie Nos Ha Visto

Submitted by ERIN BLACKWELL

 

Goya uses extreme contrast of value in a fragmented composition to depict a world of Good and Evil, but not in a way that upholds societal convention. The Spanish painter covers his canvas in browns, blues, grays, suggestive of a warm night. Atop this underpainting he roughly daubs two figures in white — a pale monk with a boney skull and a florid man with black hair. Their two heads seem to grow from a shared white cloak. They watch a third man in a gray surplice over a black robe, as he throws back his head in unrestrained song or laughter. The three together form a single mass with three heads and two hands holding glasses full of drink. Theirs is an unholy communion, an unofficial fraternizing, a good time they ought not to be seen having. The title, Nadie nos has visto (“Nobody Saw Us”) suggests the wishful thinking of the trespasser. God saw them, Goya saw them, and now we see them, too. But do we see ourselves in them?

 

Sometimes what appears good is not good, only pretends to be good and exhorts others to be good. Sometimes the Church, which teaches goodness, cannot itself demonstrate the virtues it espouses. So the significance of Light and Dark, a symbolism which is expostulated by the Church’s teachings, becomes confused and self- contradictory. The white robes of monks, meant to express purity, here clothe men who indulge impure impulses. The Light finds them out; their white robes betray them. They are seen, even in the dead of Night, to be less good than they’ve promised to be. This is the Real World that Goya is painting, the world the French imperial painter and propagandist David never saw. This is not the idealized Valhala of the warlords, but the earthy realm of fallible mortals.

 

There is a fourth figure, or silhouette that breaks into the mass of grayish white, a very dark chocolate brown that  burrows like a tunnel through the snowy robes. In the etching for which this is the study, that inchoate form is a tidy fellow with a page boy leaning into a large drink, but here he’s an imp unseen by the others. He obscures our view of them, interrupts their bodies, disrupts their integrity, makes a clear reading impossible. Is he the Lord of Misrule, or just an accident of paint, a blotch that celebrates our shadow?