Goya’s Dog

Image of cupula frescoes by Francisco de Goya depicting St Antony

Contributor: Clare Brant

Goya’s Dog

In the Ermita San Antonio de la Florida, a chapel in Madrid with frescoes by Goya, there is a circular scene around the cupola. It shows St Antony raising a man back to life in order to answer the question: who murdered him? The saint’s father has been accused; the corpse says he was not the murderer – but does not say who was. A crowd watches: in contemporary dress, all sorts of characters look on, in all sorts of attitudes. Among the figures is a hunchback with a beautiful dog, a brown hound, who leans forward towards the saint with more attention than many of the people.

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Victor Hugo’s House in Pasaia

Black and white photograph of a house

Contributor: Juan Manuel Ibeas-Altamira

Location: Pasaia, Spain

Description (English): On July 18th 1843, Victor Hugo set out on his customary annual summer trip. With Juliette Drouet he headed for Gavarnie, Luz and Cauterets. The head of the French Romantics took notes on the way. As he crossed the border he was remembering the Hugo family’s previous stay in Spain: a trip towards the exotic was also a return to childhood.

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Goya Frescoes

Image of cupula frescoes by Francisco de Goya depicting St Antony

Contributor: Clare Brant

Location: La Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid

Description: In 1798, Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) was commissioned to decorate a newly-rebuilt Neoclassical chapel devoted to St Antony of Padua (1195-1231) in a fashionable district of Madrid. Its frescoes, painted when Goya was 52 and working for the court, are a remarkable survival, and a masterpiece of religious art by Romanticism’s most versatile and original painter. Goya’s subject is a profound belief that the truth can be spoken, even if you have to revive a father’s corpse.

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The Cadiz Bomb

Contributor: Ian Haywood

Location: Horse Guards, London, United Kingdom

Description: This strange-looking, even kitsch, object stands in a corner of Horse Guards, next to St James’s Park in London. For all its garish and even comic appearance, it is actually Britain’s only public monument to the Peninsular war. It was first unveiled in 1816, but its genesis began in 1812 with the Duke of Wellington’s victory at Salamanca. One consequence of this battle was that Napoleonic forces withdrew from the two-year siege of Cadiz, seat of the Spanish Cortes and the new liberal constitution. To celebrate this liberation, the Cortes gave a huge French mortar as a gift to the Prince Regent (later George IV), requesting only that it be displayed in a public place. The Prince duly obliged and commissioned the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich to build a suitable carriage. Four years and an immense expenditure later, the Cadiz ‘bomb’, as it soon became known, was shown to the public on the Prince’s birthday. Continue reading “The Cadiz Bomb”