The House That Ate Goya

[00:00:03]Francisco Goya is 73 years old.

[00:00:07]He has survived a war that gutted this country like a fish.

[00:00:13]He has survived the Inquisition, which tried to do the same to him.

[00:00:19]He has survived a fever that took his hearing and left him with a silence so total, it became its own country.

[00:00:29]What he has not survived, what no one [music] survives, is themselves.

[00:00:36]He is going to a house outside [music] Madrid.

[00:00:39]He bought it from a dead man.

[00:00:42]This will seem, in time, like an omen.

[00:00:46]It did not seem like one then.

[00:00:49]It seemed like a [music] bargain.

[00:01:14]>> [music] [music] >> The wall was approximately 12 [music] ft wide and 9 ft high.

[00:01:57]Goya stood in front of it for 4 hours before [music] he touched it.

[00:02:04]>> [music] >> The neighbors, had there been any, would have found this unremarkable.

[00:02:15]Painters are strange. [music] The deaf ones are stranger still.

[00:02:20]A deaf painter [music] standing motionless in a room for 4 hours is simply a man who has learned to wait inside his own skull.

[00:02:29]The wall, for its part, waited, too.

[00:02:33]>> [music] >> It had been waiting much longer.

[00:02:37]There is a question [music] people ask about the black paintings that has no good answer.

[00:02:42]Did Goya [music] paint them because he was losing his mind, or did he paint them to keep from losing it?

[00:02:48]The paintings themselves decline [music] to say.

[00:02:51]They are not interested in being explained.

[00:02:54]They are interested [music] in being looked at.

[00:02:57]Whether you can stop looking is another matter.

[00:03:00]>> [music] [music] >> He did not call a priest. He did not write [music] to his son.

[00:03:16]He did not leave.

[00:03:17]He added a shadow.

[00:03:19]This is either the act of a madman or a great artist.

[00:03:24]History has not fully [music] decided.

[00:03:26]History rarely does.

[00:03:31]He did not sleep.

[00:03:33]>> [music] >> He lay in the dark and thought about what he'd said.

[00:03:37]There's nothing left to take from you.

[00:03:39]He thought about the war.

[00:03:41]He thought about the streets [music] full of bodies.

[00:03:43]He thought about the silence that had eaten his hearing, the way Saturn would eat a son.

[00:03:49]He thought, [music] "I have been here before.

[00:03:53]Not in this house, in this [music] place.

[00:03:56]He got up before dawn and went back to the wall.

[00:04:00]>> [music] >> No one else saw it.

[00:04:03]This is the part of the story where, if you are a rational person, you make a note.

[00:04:08]Elderly [music] man, deteriorating health, possible hallucinations.

[00:04:14]Symptoms consistent [music] with But then you look at the paintings and you think, what if he was seeing correctly?

[00:04:22]What if the rest of us simply lack the equipment?

[00:04:25]A deaf man in a silent house >> [music] >> painting monsters on the walls, or a man who had spent 50 years painting [music] the truth about this world finally given enough quiet to finish the thought.

[00:04:51]Saturn.

[00:04:53]The god who ate [music] his children because a prophecy said one of them would overthrow him.

[00:04:59]He ate them and it happened [music] anyway.

[00:05:02]The one child who escaped, Jupiter, came back and tore the world open.

[00:05:09]Goya knew this story.

[00:05:11]Everyone knew this story.

[00:05:13]He had probably painted it before, somewhere, for someone who wanted a ceiling decorated with mythology [music] and didn't look too closely at the faces.

[00:05:23]This version he painted [music] for himself.

[00:05:26]There is no ceiling here.

[00:05:28]There is no commission. There is no patron [music] waiting in a silk chair to approve the composition.

[00:05:34]There is only a 73-year-old man in a room full of things he couldn't stop seeing, painting them so they'd have somewhere [music] to be.

[00:05:45]The black paintings [music] have no titles.

[00:05:48]The titles they go by now, Saturn devouring his [music] son, The Witches' Sabbath, Two Old Men Eating, were given to them after the fact [music] by other people trying to describe what they were looking at.

[00:06:08]Goya named none of them, which is either [music] very humble or very honest.

[00:06:17]A thing that has to be [music] named hasn't quite been understood yet.

[00:06:26]He understood [music] these.

[00:06:27]He just didn't want to talk about them.

[00:06:36]He left Spain [music] 3 years later.

[00:06:39]He went to Bordeaux.

[00:06:40]He took nothing from the house.

[00:06:43]Not the paintings, [music] not the furniture, not the name above the gate.

[00:06:49]He left it all [music] exactly as it was.

[00:06:52]Every wall covered, every figure [music] staring at the empty room.

[00:06:57]He never went back.

[00:06:59]He died in Bordeaux [music] in 1828.

[00:07:02]He was 82 years old.

[00:07:04]He was still drawing.

[00:07:06]Some people don't know how to stop.

[00:07:08]Most [music] of them are painters.

[00:07:14]>> [music] >> They will stand [music] here for approximately 40 minutes.

[00:07:28]They will not speak for the first 20.

[00:07:31]This is unusual for them.

[00:07:33]They are ordinarily very talkative people.

[00:07:38]Something about the room makes conversation seem beside the point.

[00:07:44]Neither of them spoke about it.

[00:07:46]Not to each other.

[00:07:48]Not to anyone.

[00:07:49]Some things you decide are better carried quietly.

[00:07:54]The house stood for another 50 years before it was demolished.

[00:07:58]By then the paintings had been removed carefully and sent to Madrid.

[00:08:04]They are there now.

[00:08:05]In the Prado.

[00:08:07]Room 67.

[00:08:09]Saturn is across from the dog.

[00:08:11]The dog is still sinking.

[00:08:13]Saturn is [music] still eating.

[00:08:16]The painted door is not in the collection.

[00:08:19]No one knows what [music] happened to it.

[00:08:22]Most likely it was lost in the transfer.

[00:08:25]These things happen with old paintings.

[00:08:28]Most likely.