El Pelele
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| El Pelele |
|---|
| Francisco de Goya , 1791/1792 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 267 × 160 cm |
| Museo del Prado |
El Pelele (German: The Straw Puppet ) is the title of a painting by Francisco de Goya , created in 1791/1792, on which a board game is shown in which a doll is thrown into the air. The work was part of a series of designs by the painter for tapestries commissioned by Charles IV. Of Spain . It was set to music at the beginning of the 20th century andstagedin an opera .
background
From 1775 Francisco de Goya delivered designs for the royal carpet manufacturer Santa Bárbara in Madrid. After his appointment as a professor at the academy, he entered the service of King Charles III of Spain as court painter in 1786 . and from 1788 in that of the successor to Charles IV of Spain. Between 1775 and 1780 and from 1786 to 1792 for the Escorial Goya made a total of 62 designs for tapestries in seven series, each with different themes, such as hunting , socializing and work . The so-called cardboard boxes , executed in oil on canvas, were the templates for the carpet weavers; they are now part of the Museo del Prado in Madrid .
The paintings
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The box with the title El Pelele was one of the last, the seventh series of Goya's designs, in which the relationship between the sexes is ironized with women and children in a way that foreshadows Goya's later aquatint print series of the Caprichos (1796/1797).
The painting shows four young women of higher class in front of a park-like background in which the tower of a castle or a large country house can be seen in the distance. The women hold a cloth taut over its four corners, with which they toss a doll dressed up in a man's costume and masked into the air. Their expressions, amused in different ways, underline the demonstration that they can do whatever they want with the men. In Spanish, the word pelele has different meanings. In addition to a “straw doll”, it denotes the “ jumping jack ” known since the 16th century and, in the metaphorical sense, a “ idiot ”, as well as the “ romper ” in modern times .
In two earlier designs for the box, the artist had given the doll a raised head posture and a more upright position, as if it were enjoying the game and the flight in the air. The drooping head in the final version and the crooked posture give the figure the expression of sadness and solidify the implicit motive of violence in the way women treat men.
The straw doll
Pelele was the Spanish term for a traditional children's and parlor game in which a doll, made from clothes stuffed with straw, was thrown into the air with the help of a cloth. This doll usually represented an unloved person whose air flights were accompanied by songs of mockery.
Straw dolls were also traditionally used in the Spanish carnival . For example, at the burial of the sardine , a folk festival that heralded the beginning of Lent , a giant straw doll with a small sardine dangling from it was carried along with other props . The Spanish Inquisition also used to burn convicted delinquents who had escaped execution of the sentence in effigy in the form of a straw dummy on a stake.
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Francisco de Goya took up the motif of the doll in his series of etchings Desastres de la Guerra ( Horrors of War , 1810-1814) again. Sheet number 67 shows three men carrying the figure of a nun on their backs, consisting of a frame with paper and stuffed accessories , in the direction of an implied castle or church architecture. In the background a figure that looks similar, a bell, is dragged along; the only vaguely recognizable audience turns away without interest. The title, Esta no lo es menos ( It is no less ) refers to the preceding sheet 66 in the series, which is titled Estraña devocion ( Strange Piety ) and shows a donkey with a glass coffin on its back with a mummified corpse is carried by a group of simply robed people crouching on the ground. With the motif, Goya cited a fable by the Spanish poet Félix María Samaniego (1745–1801), which goes back to La Fontaine , in which an imaginary donkey carrying images of saints stands for a foolish government. In the two sheets Goya paid less attention to the endangerment and destruction of sculptures and relics caused by the war than to the restorative tendencies associated with them . In sheet 67 of the Desastres he depicted the three men in the already old-fashioned clothing of the 18th century, which also identifies them as members of the higher classes and the clergy. The effort to preserve antiquated images turns out to be an effort to preserve an empty form.
reception
The Spanish composer Enrique Granados (1867–1916) was inspired in 1911 for his piano cycle entitled Goyescas by Francisco de Goya's paintings, which show Spanish folk life. He dedicated the cycle to his wife. On behalf of the Paris Opera , Granados worked it into an opera in which he also set Goya's La Pelele to music for a scene based on the painting. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Paris withdrew the commission and the Goyescas opera was then performed in the Metropolitan Opera in New York . On their return trip to Europe in 1916, the composer and his wife were killed on the Sussex passenger liner after a German submarine attack in the English Channel .
Others
On March 24, 1958, on the day of the 1958 postage stamp , the Spanish Post issued a special edition with paintings by Goya, which also contained a postage stamp with the motif The Straw Doll .
literature
- Rainer Hagen, Rose-Marie Hagen: Goya . Bags: Cologne, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris, Tokyo 2003, ISBN 3-8228-1821-6
- Hamburger Kunsthalle (ed.): Goya. Los Desastres de la Guerra . Stuttgart 1992
Individual evidence
- ↑ Museo del Prado: Cartones para tapices (Goya) . (Spanish)
- ↑ Rainer Hagen, Rose-Marie Hagen: Goya (2003), p. 19 (english edition)
- ↑ Children's games from Europe: Pelele (Spain) ( Memento from June 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Neoclassicism and Romanticism - Francisco de Goya : Heathen carnival dance , with an explanation of the festive ritual in the text (English)
- ↑ Hamburger Kunsthalle: Goya (1992), pp. 140-143
- ↑ Victor Ieronim Stoichiţă, Anna Maria Coderch: Goya. The Last Carnival . Reaction Books 1999, ISBN 1-86189-045-1 , p. 92
- ↑ Goyescas. An Opera by Enrique Granados
