Religiosity and secularism: Two case studies of the nineteenth-century French reception of Spanish art. Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617--1682) and Francisco Jose Goya y Lucientes (1746--1828) (Charles Baudelaire)

This dissertation offers a revised and deepened view of the art of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–82) and Francisco José Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), arguing that the religious works of Murillo conceal secular concerns related to fundamental issues of sexuality and aesthetics, while the ostensibly secular works of Goya in fact confront the fundamental theological theme of dogmatic sin. My study of the nineteenth-century French reception of the works of both artists reveals that neither can be understood fully without the other. Nineteenth-century France identified Spanish art as encompassing both a gentle brand of Catholicism and grotesque realism. Among the myriad of Spanish religious subjects imported into France in the early decades of the nineteenth century, it was Murillo's tender depictions of the Virgin Mary that were the most effusively celebrated, even as they were implicitly associated with a particularly Spanish brand of terror. I explore the institutional preference for Murillo's aesthetics and argue that the multiple copies of his works produced for church decoration reflected a desire to control the individual expression of creativity represented by original work; an effort to establish a profoundly emotional relationship between worshippers and the Virgin; an attempt to confirm women in their domestic roles; and a confrontation with the relationships among beauty, ugliness, and gender. In a reappraisal of Goya's work, I explore Charles Baudelaire's essay on the artist in Quelques caricaturistes étrangers, published in 1857 together with one of the critic's most provocative discussions of the theme of the centrality of dogmatic evil, De l'essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques. I argue that Baudelaire discovered in the works of Goya a new pictorial vocabulary, not only for the horror embedded in Murillo's imagery, but also for the key Christian concept of the original fall from grace. In the drawings, prints, and paintings of Goya, the Fall assumes forms that are comic, ironic, absurd, and grotesque, embodying elements of the biblical tragedy while also transcending religious myth to explore the nature of social and individual difference, beauty, memory, and the self.