When walking around inside the Blanton Museum, I noticed the entire exhibit on Goya’s “Mad Reason” mostly did not display colored pieces. I had a particularly difficult time trying to find a piece that I thought was beautiful or striking; nothing seemed to immediately evoke an emotion, except Goya’s Still Life with Golden Bream to which I found myself wandering back to the piece at least three times, thinking to myself there was something special about it. Goya’s Golden Bream is one of very few of his exhibited pieces that were in color. I think that’s why Golden Bream is also all the more special. Golden Bream might just seem like fish stacked upon each other next to an ocean shore, but this piece is so much more than that.
The materials Goya …show more content…
The Anglo-Spanish War between Spain, France, and Great Britain continued well into the early 19th Century, around the time Goya painted Golden Bream. Golden Bream was grouped into Goya’s exhibit of “Los Desastres de la guerra”, or “The Disasters of War”. For a moment, I questioned why a simple pile of fish might be included in this specific exhibit, and before I knew it, I realized that that Golden Bream is not just a simple pile of fish, but rather a metaphor, and perhaps a reference, to Goya’s other pieces in the series. The fish in Golden Bream, which in fact are freshly caught as evidenced by their dampness and glistening eyes, resemble the heaped corpses in the Anglo-Spanish War. In many of Goya’s pieces in the series, observers will note that those too contain heaps and piles of human corpses. However, this metaphor may be particularly elusive to the average observer, so this comparison to human casualties exists in an observer’s imagination rather than in Golden Bream itself. I also wanted to note that Goya’s choice of fish is peculiar, yet ironic; he compares heaped corpses to the one thing that Spain did not have during and after the Anglo-Spanish war – food. These questions about the obscurity of meaning behind a painting can and is definitely relevant to how beautiful a work may be. The answers to such questions in the end, I think, can only enhance the
The materials Goya …show more content…
The Anglo-Spanish War between Spain, France, and Great Britain continued well into the early 19th Century, around the time Goya painted Golden Bream. Golden Bream was grouped into Goya’s exhibit of “Los Desastres de la guerra”, or “The Disasters of War”. For a moment, I questioned why a simple pile of fish might be included in this specific exhibit, and before I knew it, I realized that that Golden Bream is not just a simple pile of fish, but rather a metaphor, and perhaps a reference, to Goya’s other pieces in the series. The fish in Golden Bream, which in fact are freshly caught as evidenced by their dampness and glistening eyes, resemble the heaped corpses in the Anglo-Spanish War. In many of Goya’s pieces in the series, observers will note that those too contain heaps and piles of human corpses. However, this metaphor may be particularly elusive to the average observer, so this comparison to human casualties exists in an observer’s imagination rather than in Golden Bream itself. I also wanted to note that Goya’s choice of fish is peculiar, yet ironic; he compares heaped corpses to the one thing that Spain did not have during and after the Anglo-Spanish war – food. These questions about the obscurity of meaning behind a painting can and is definitely relevant to how beautiful a work may be. The answers to such questions in the end, I think, can only enhance the