Yard with Lunatics

Francisco de Goya
Yard with Lunatics, Francisco de Goya, 1794
By ROSIE PASQUALINI

Francisco de Goya’s Yard With Lunatics [also: Pen of Crazies] is a testament to the chilling apathy of isolation, a diving-bell-and-butterfly horrorscape doused in blasphemous flair. A gradient crescendoes from light to dark as brightness dies in the corners of the courtyard, then glows anew near the “lunatics’” feet, showing a rightful link between the outside world and the trapped while simultaneously emboldening the shadow of each patient’s despair. Two nude men fight in the center; their struggle resembles an embrace. A warden, whose somber clothing matches the shadows, whips the men apart. This clearly evokes the concept of slavery. He gazes up at the sky, as if doing God’s work, while a crawling woman stares into his unseeing eyes. Look down.

Save this woman and the fighting men, none of the damned exchange glances. A lack of meaningful interaction, in Goya’s mind, was the worst of physical and emotional entrapment. He would have agreed with Virginia Woolf’s Septimus that “communication is health.” Each ‘lunatic’ has a distinct personality, an inner world waiting to be understood. Are those blue dots merely blemishes, we wonder, or a bow in the grimacing woman’s hair? Goya claims to have witnessed this scene as a child; perhaps the painting’s tidbits of individuality are memories, or perhaps they were added to evoke the terror he felt, a shiver of prophecy foretelling a drowning self. Goya painted this piece two years after he went deaf. He surely feared that the limitations of his physicality would entrap his soul, forging a distance between himself and those he needed. Man is a social animal, and this anguish glimmers deep within every one of us. As Wordsworth writes: “Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear/The longest date do melt like frosty rime.” Whether in body or in mind, you, too, are made for melting.

We are all born mad, I think, and hide our strangeness in different ways. We must find solace in our mutual insanity. And remember: Time is short and feeble. You were not made to raise yourself above others, to hurt others. You must see past the cages of the flesh; you must seek to understand. The only victory is compassion. 
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Just Your Average Mental Breakdown: Yard with Lunatics

Drew Bierwirth
Just Your Average Mental Breakdown
Artists Losing It
Curated by Drew Bierwirth

Francisco Goya, Yard with Lunatics, 1794

Goya himself said that this piece, part of a series of 11 pieces painted on tin, was to be "devoid of fantasy or fiction." Marking a significant change in his art, these pieces do not show daydreams and bright colors, instead they give us a peek into Goya's deteriorating mental state. He abandoned all of his past lightness in favor of using his talents to deal with the demons in his mind. This piece he described as “…a yard with lunatics, and two of them fighting completely naked while their warder beats them, and others in sacks—a scene I witnessed…”
Here, Goya doesn't take the usual approach, using chiaroscuro to lighten and exaggerate the scene. Instead, he allows it to be as dark as it is in his mind, shadows playing their own games and wrapping the scene in claustrophobic darkness. Art historian Arthur Danto spoke of the piece, saying Goya went from painting "a world in which there were no shadows to a world in which there was no light". Each lunatic is in their own world, part of the moment but so very much in their own. One sits on the ground, facing the viewer instead of the conflict happening right behind him. Goya artfully creates multiple focal points here, instead of making the two fighting in the middle the only thing to look at.

In his later life, Goya started to paint more and more political pieces with hidden messages abounding. Instead of painting members of Spanish court as before, he began to paint his own life and criticize culture with his work. During this period, asylums were more like holes to throw the psychotic into and keep them away from normal citizens instead of to treat their illnesses. Goya's inner torment and fear of mental illness seeps through the piece, making the viewer painfully aware of his grief. His own experiences during this time are exposed, with his own mental illness developing - the voices in his head getting louder, his hearing deteriorating. Makes me wonder which one of these lunatics Goya views as himself.
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