Painting of the Week - Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga by Francisco de Goya

Francisco de Goya e Lucientes, Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga, c.1788
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) is a very interesting fellow in the history of art. Unlike the contemporary situation for artists in Italy and France, artists in Spain were considered lower class. To elevate themselves socially, artists had to try and associate themselves with church commissions or align themselves to the aristocracy. Goya being an ambitious fellow aligned him to the biggest Spanish fish of all, the Spanish Royal Family.

Things went well for him here and he got many commissions to do portraits of various court members, such Don Manuel de Zuniga, but in 1792 Goya suffered an illness that left him that left him profoundly deaf. Combined with the contemporary Napoleonic Wars, Goya's oeuvre can be divided into the early and more traditional works (which can still be a little creepy), and his more introspective and darker later works such as the Third of May or the Caprichos.

Goya was commissioned by Count Altamira to paint his son Don Manuel not long after he was assigned Court Painter to King Carlos III. In this absolutely gorgeous portrait, the young boy is oputlently dressed in a darrrrrrrling red jumpsuit with a cage of birds and holds a pet magpie on a string which is menacingly stared at by three cats. According to my visitors guide to The Met, caged birds in Baroque period paintings are symbolic of innocence, and thus Goya has painted this as showing the frail boundaries between childhood and the forces of evil.