GOYA'S ENGRAVINGS 45 of Goya's contemporaries are smooth, finished pieces, competently executed and technically impeccable; but at the same time they are depressingly conventional. Charles IV had encouraged the importation of engraving into Spain and set up the Royal Calcography at Madrid with the motivating idea of disseminating prints which supported officially sanctioned value codes amidst a wider public, with an eynphasis on ornate miniatures and skillful calligraphy. Goya subverts this imitative, polite and enervated tradition with explosive violence. He hurls defiance at the slavish replicators of visible reality and fashions a completely new idiom whose unique character depends upon its reliance on distortion as a mode of social and moral comment. Misshapen, exaggerated and animalistic variations on the human physiognomy and countenance permeate his graphic frames. Goya's art affords an inside view of the absurd, the radically strange, and the morally repugnant. As in Hogarth, but on an altogether different level, distortion becomes in Goya a way of perceiving the world as well as a strategy for adjudicating against it. In this sense Goya belongs to a great tradition of eighteenth—and nineteenth—century artists including Swift, Gogol, Dickens and Dostoyevski, in whom distortive treatment of the surface of reality combines with an intensely critical diagnostic realism of content. The black lines of an engraving serve Goya much better than the equipment of a florid colourist in his evocation of the morally dark world which is condemned in his etchings. Goya's revolutionary formal mode grows hand in hand with a revolutionary content, vividly affirming the fact that significant advances in technique are usually coextensive with corresponding leaps in consciousness. The history of Goya'.s personal development as an etcher is a microcos-mic version of the history of engraving in Spain. Beginning with conventional imitation^ ofValesquez. Goya strikes out in a totally unprecedented direction in his four major series. The Caprices, The Disasters of War, Tauromachy and Disparates. Goya's breakthrough as an engraver betokens the democratisatiQn of fine arts. Engraving is in the same relation .to pictorial art as printing is to the written word : the respective developments of both took them out of the courts and salons and made art and letters available to an emerging popular public. Goya seizes the advantage offered by this process : the subject matter of pictorial art is emancipated from the norms and confines assigned to it by ruling-class aesthetics and addresses the problems of common life. In 1792 Goya suffered a serious illness which left him deaf for life, a circumstance that was to transform his life and work, enhancing his sensitivity to the lot of those who live in misery, wretchedness and deprivation. It produced an increasing alienation from the elite world into which he had, by virtue of his talent, graduated from his peasant origins. Returning to work after his illness, he seemed to have become an artist with a mission and a commitment. The result was a series of social satires which were published under the tide The Caprices. Within a very short rime, however, the prints had to^be withdrawn after Goya incurred the ire of the Inquisition, so that early in his