Dear Reader,
Madrid, the beautiful and vibrant city where I sit typing this, was founded in the mid-ninth century by the Emir of Córdoba. The name is a corruption of Maŷriţ, a derivation of the Arabic word for stream. That was during the Islamic period, before Ferdinand III of Castile “reconquered” the Iberian peninsula, repulsing the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
He was a pious king, was Ferdinand III, but he was not a fanatic. He recognized that the diversity of his dominions was Spain’s superpower. He took the land from the Almohads but did not try to stamp out their faith. He openly crowed about Spain being a kingdom of three great religions.
Despite three centuries of proof of concept, his namesake, Ferdinand II of Aragon, did not agree. In 1478, a few years after jointly taking the throne, he and his wife, Isabella of Castile, established the Spanish Inquisition; they were the first secular monarchs to be granted Papal authority to do so. Then, in 1492, as the sociopathic Italian “explorer” whose voyage the king and queen subsidized “discovered” America, Ferdinand and Isabella decreed that all Jews must convert to Catholicism or leave Spain.
Hey, Siri: What happens when a rich, powerful nation invests most of its wealth, energy, and human resources into terrorizing, rounding up, imprisoning, torturing, slaughtering, and driving out its own citizens—the very people most responsible for its economic success—because they are not straight white Christians? Would that the answer was not so relevant to us in the U.S. in 2026.
What followed in Spain was a period of paranoia, despotism, and corruption on the home front, while in the New World, conquistadors established the African slave trade, plundered the land, and slaughtered those Native Americans who did not die of the plague the Europeans brought with them—a genocide so brutal, so heartless, and so systematically effective that it would make the IDF tip its collective cap. The extraction of silver from the mines of Bolivia and Peru kept Spain in the black while its kings grew more inbred and its empire fell helplessly behind France and Britain. Four and a half centuries later, Spain would be a hotbed of fascism and, with the founding of Opus Dei, Catholic extremism of the 20th century variety.
There is no more appropriate foreign country in which to spend the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States than Spain. First, because there are lessons to be learned here—about diversity, about “own goals,” about religious toleration, about the defeat of fascism, about managing an empire in decline. And second, because without Spain, there would be no Semiquincentennial; it is an underreported fact of the Revolutionary War, but the ragtag American colonists would never have defeated the British a quarter millennium ago without Spanish aid—a kindness we repaid in our lovely American way by ending the Spanish Empire in 1898.
(Because I am in Madrid for a coin show, I am obliged to mention that U.S. currency was pegged to the Spanish silver dollar from the founding of the nation until the Coinage Act of 1857. “Pieces of eight” are silver eight real coins—Spanish dollars.)
Any great nation that endures for so many centuries has shameful moments in its history. Spain, as we’ve discussed, is no exception. If a country could be said to have a conscience, Spain’s would be in torment. And if an artist could somehow take on the tormented conscience of the entire Spanish nation, that artist would be Francisco de Goya.
Before I went to the Prado yesterday afternoon, I didn’t know much about Goya—in fact, I kept getting him mixed up with El Greco, even though they are nothing alike—other than he made flattering portraits of doofy-looking kings.
The museum, set in a building Napoleon used as cavalry barracks, was both not claustrophobic in layout and surprisingly not crowded. I was delighted to learn that Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” was on exhibit, and I spent a good half hour looking at that and a few other of his triptychs, which are stunning IRL.
I fully intended to write about one of “El Bosco’s” other works, if not just a travelogue of Madrid generally. And then I stumbled into the dimly-lit room that houses Goya’s so-called “Black Paintings,” and my plans immediately changed. The works themselves are so tortured, so weird, so nightmarish, that they immediately stand out. But once I learned the context of the paintings—when they were painted, and where, and how, and by whom, and also how they came to be moved to the Prado in the first place—I became fixated. It was like bingeing a limited series on Netflix. I bought two books about it in the gift shop—one in Spanish, which I do not speak a word of—and set about studying Goya’s later years.
The span of Goya’s long life—1746 to 1828—included some of the most important and cataclysmic events in European history: the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and, in Spain, the war of independence against the French, the constitution of 1812, and the subsequent crackdown of liberalism by another shitty king named Ferdinand. Goya’d managed to adroitly manage the perilous politics, earning a good living producing portraits for the royal court, while at the same time quietly opposing despotism.
But something about the Restoration broke him. In 1819, Goya bought a country estate outside of Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo—the “House of the Deaf Man.” His wife had died a few years before. Although he was not the eponymous deaf man, he had himself gone deaf during a mysterious illness in the winter of 1792-3. And he was 73 years old—for that time, a veritable Spanish Methuselah.
Old, deaf, disillusioned, and tormented, it seems, by inner demons, Goya repaired to the country house, where he almost immediately fell deathly ill, only for his life to be saved by the ministrations of his dear friend, who happened to be a physician. Once his strength returned, he began work on the Black Paintings, which he produced between 1820 and 1823.
But here’s the thing: he painted them on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. The plaster walls. These visions of anguish and nightmare were what he chose to look at in his own house—his personal décor. He did not receive many visitors; he lived in the house with Leocadia Weiss, his much younger caretaker, who may also have been his lover, and her children—one of whom, the painter Rosario Weiss Zorilla, rumored to have also been his. (His guilt about the living arrangement is evident in some of the paintings and likely contributed to his internal agony.)
Goya did not talk about the paintings to anyone. He did not write about them to anyone. He did not mention them anywhere. He did not give them titles. And because they were rendered on crumbling plaster, he did not intend for anyone else to see them. As the art critic Fred Licht wrote, the Black Paintings “are as close to being hermetically private as any that have ever been produced in the history of Western art.”
Salvador Martínez Cubells, an artist and art restorer, supervised a process of taking the paintings from the plaster and moving them onto canvas, which I did not think was possible, decades later—after the invention of photography, thank God. That’s what I was looking at in that dim room at the Prado: 14 works the artists never wanted me, or anyone else, to see—faithfully restored, but damaged in the process.
The word nightmarish is often used to describe these paintings. I’ve already used it a few times myself. But that suggests, to our modern ears, something from a stylized horror film—or, in the art world, a Dali or a Picasso (also Spaniards, for what it’s worth). The Black Paintings are like actual nightmares—not the kind rendered in comic books and TV shows, not Goth and cool, but the dreams we wake up from in a cold sweat and want to forget about as soon as possible.
Here is a painting of the god Saturn eating one of his children, per the Greek myth. At least, that’s what we think it is. He didn’t give it that title. We don’t really know what was going through Goya’s mind here—and I’m not sure we want to:
Between that and this one…
…there’s perhaps more Epstein Files foreshadowing than I’d care to contemplate.
The painting at the top of the page has been titled “A Pilgrimage to San Isidro.” It’s a Bizarro World inversion of a happier painting of a similar pilgrimage Goya produced 30 years prior. That was the one I stared at the longest. In person, the aspect ratio is odd—it’s probably 4 feet high by 12 feet wide, longer and narrower than letterbox, so the right side of the painting sort of slinks away like a lizard’s tail. And these faces, my God:
The only certainty about this painting is that the background is the view of Madrid from Goya’s estate; these people—zombie-like, demented, creepy, and all open-mouthed, which is not something you generally see in art from that period—are coming right up to his door, as if trick-or-treating. I shall defer to John J. Ciafalo on this one; in The Self-Portraits of Francisco Goya, he writes, “It is Goya whom they have come to see.” This part made me gasp: “And to serenade: for what does it matter to a deaf man that the guitar has no strings?”
If I lined up all 14 paintings and told you to pick out the one that doesn’t belong, you are almost certain to land on “The Dog,” also known as “The Drowning Dog.” It is the only one that doesn’t have the same nightmarish quality—making it, paradoxically, the most terrifying of the lot:
Stephen Phelan wrote about this in The Guardian a few years ago:
And I keep coming back to “The Drowning Dog,” which is funny only in the sense that it makes me cry in public. What long-dead pet served as Goya’s model? The artist loved dogs and wrote about them often in his letters. It reminds me of my own dog, now old and grey around the snout. How long do we have left together? I look at this painting and I see in that poor animal our condition in general, and our historical moment in particular. I’m the dog and you’re the dog, our heads held just above a dark, rising tide.
The dog is Goya. The dog is Phelan. The dog is you, the dog is me. The dog is Spain, the dog is the United States. The dog is all of us, innocent and trusting, small and insignificant, and ultimately helpless against the omnipotent forces against us.
And yet for more than 200 years now, that dog has stayed alive.
It’s not a drowning dog, not really.
It’s a rescue dog.
I happened to come to Madrid during the Gay Pride festival, the hub of which is two blocks from my hotel. There are rainbow flags on everything—even the Bank of Spain has an enormous rainbow banner on its otherwise austere stone wall. People are out in the street, walking, singing, dancing, parading, having a good time—gay and straight, young and old, Spanish and foreign, Catholic and not, many races, many genders, all together, all united. I’d expected this city to be somewhat conservative, so this is lovely to behold.
The lesson from Spain is that it’s possible to survive and thrive after an empire falls. The thing about losing your status as a hegemonic world superpower is that you can stop worrying about losing your status as a hegemonic world superpower. Or, as Ben Reilly says in Spider-Noir, “With no power comes no responsibility.”
This is a country that has known empire. This is a country that has lost empire. And this is a country that shows us that an empire in decline is not necessarily a bad thing.
There are beautiful people here in Madrid. And I don’t mean beautiful in the sense of physical attractiveness (although there is plenty of that). I mean beautiful as in the vibe, the energy, the passion for having a good time.
If this is what life is like post empire, sign me up.
