Goya lost painting
March 2006
"Hannibal the Conqueror, viewing Italy from the Alps for the first time"
1770 oil on canvas, 12 1/4 by 16 inches.
In January 2000, Sotheby's New York sold this rediscovered Goya oil sketch for $498,000.00 USD
The painting is sold by Sotheby's stating the image was painted during Goya's sojourn in Rome as prepration for entering the 1771 Academy of Fine Arts competition in Parma, Italy.
The Parma Academy awarded Goya a "honorable mention" for his eventual completed entry (See page 6, Goya by Patricia Wright.)
From the Sotheby catalogue:
"The present recently discovered oil sketch by Goya was painted while the artist while he was living in Rome in preparation for his entry in the competition of 1771 sponsored by the Academy of Fine Arts in Parma. Goya’s finished painting for that competition was itself only recently rediscovered in the collection of the Asturian Selgas-Fagalde Foundation, kept at "El Pito’ in Cudillero….The rediscovery of the Selgas-Fagalde painting was based on the identification of another oil sketch presumed to be a model for the Parma project …and on several preparatory drawings for the composition from Goya’s ‘Italian sketchbook.’….The theme chosen for the Parma composition….was based on a poem by Abbot Carlos Innocenzo Frugoni who had served as secretary of the Parma academy until 1769. Goya chose to depict the River Po in the personification of a reclining male figure with the head of an ox,…In the end, Goya did not win the competition…though he did win good notices from the jury."
Original Page 2006- Update June 2019
AMAZON
Goya The Terrible Sublime - Graphic Novel - (Spanish Edition) - Amazon
"From this headlong seizure of life we should not expect a calm and refined art, nor a reflective one. Yet Goya was more than a Nietzschean egoist riding roughshod over the world to assert his supermanhood. He was receptive to all shades of feeling, and it was his extreme sensitivity as well as his muscular temerity that actuated his assaults on the outrageous society of Spain." From Thomas Craven's essay on Goya from MEN OF ART (1931).
"...Loneliness has its limits, for Goya was not a prophet but a painter. If he had not been a painter his attitude to life would have found expression only in preaching or suicide." From Andre Malroux's essay in SATURN: AN ESSAY ON GOYA (1957).
"Goya is always a great artist, often a frightening one...light and shade play upon atrocious horrors." From Charles Baudelaire's essay on Goya from CURIOSITES ESTRANGERS (1842).
"[An] extraordinary mingling of hatred and compassion, despair and sardonic humour, realism and fantasy." From the foreword by Aldous Huxley to THE COMPLETE ETCHINGS OF GOYA (1962).
"His analysis in paint, chalk and ink of mass disaster and human frailty pointed to someone obsessed with the chaos of existence..." From the book on Goya by Sarah Symmons (1998).
"I cannot forgive you for admiring Goya...I find nothing in the least pleasing about his paintings or his etchings..." From a letter to (spanish) Duchess Colonna from the French writer Prosper Merimee (1869).
GOYA : Los Caprichos - Dover Edition - Amazon
