ABSTRACT
Charles IV of Spain, or more exactly, Carlos Antonio Pascual Francisco Javier Juan Nepomuceno José Januario Serafín Diego, was a man who loved fine things. Even without sifting through the royal inventories of his palaces and pleasure pavilions found throughout the Iberian Peninsula, we can discern that material pleasures abounded at the Spanish court at the very end of the eighteenth century. Their visual effects are prominently on display in the famous group portrait of the king and his family painted by Francisco Goya (Plate 5). Goya deftly turns painted brushstrokes into shimmering silks, rich velvets, and pendulous gold and silver ornaments pinned to sashes and nestled in folds of hair. The attentiveness to material finery contrasts with the distracted and hastily rendered faces of the sitters, or more precisely standers, faces derided by later art critics as “abominable, contemptible, mediocre, or at best pathetic.”1 Modern art historians have tended to read this royal commission in terms of Goya’s uncanny powers as a social critic and his ability to turn an image of authority upside down into a satire that captures the “human bankruptcy” at the heart of the Spanish crown. Seen this way, the luxury on display appears to signal a lurking sense of financial insolvency rather than monarchical might, as the much-maligned Queen María Luisa in the center of the painting pulls her children close in order to emphasize her role as guarantor of the threatened House of Bourbon’s dynastic succession.2 Whether we choose to regard Goya’s exceptional image as grotesque or simply accurate, the portrait nonetheless underscores the broader problems in the signification of luxury that confronted the court of Charles IV, a monarch who sought to maintain his rightful claims to the throne even as the French republican government increasingly encroached upon the domestic affairs of Spain. Parsing once more the sparkling finery at work in Goya’s group portrait, we can see that the French have in fact already arrived on the Iberian Peninsula. For as Aileen Ribeiro writes, it was likely that “the glittering, gauzy silks worn by María Luisa in her court dress would be French, as was the high-waisted style with attached train made fashionable by Josephine Bonaparte in France.”3
