|
MAJADA Goya’s love affair with Doña María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana, the Duchess of Alba, is ripe for an adult and unadulterated movie. He was middle-aged, deaf and married when he met and fell in immediate lust with the equally promiscuous and much younger Duchess, who was also married (at 13 to a codger Marquis). The match incongruous: Goya was fat and unattractive, without wealth, probably syphilitic, and she was celebrated—as well as envied—as one of the richest and most beautiful and desirable women of her time. In the summer of 1795 they started their affaire d’amour, which scandalized the Royals, especially Queen Luisa, who more than once banished the defiant Duchess from Madrid. When the Duchess’s husband died (rumored to have been poisoned), she retreated to her Andalusia estate to flauntingly mourn—by taking Goya with her. During this sojourn, he sketched her in what are described as his most erotic drawings. Though they parted briefly, due to Royal pressure, soon they were rejoined and in 1799—with some historians disputing the following—he purportedly painted her as La Maja Desnuda, perhaps at her request. Doubters believe the portrait and its twin The Clothed Maja were of Josefa de Tudó, 1st Countess of Castillo File, lover and eventual wife of Spanish Prime Minister Manuel Godoy, who was likely Luisa’s lover as well. (A disinterested observation of the Majas and Goya’s other paintings of the Duchess would conclude there are at least resemblances.) The common explanation for The Clothed Maja is Goya risked censure, imprisonment or death in doing a forbidden nude; in fact, when the Inquisition discovered the Desnuda and demanded an inquiry, a rowdy citizenry, growing impatient with suppression, and some of the Royals coalesced support for Goya and he managed to elude punishment. Romantic legends have grown around the Majas, one of the persistent among Spanish plebs was the Marquis, when hearing of the painting, stormed to Goya’s residence to defend his honor and came upon not the naked but the clothed version of Maja, regardless of the fact he died 3 years before Goya is said to have painted the twins. And when the Duchess’s death came suddenly in the summer of 1802, gossip spread she too was poisoned, this time by order of Luisa, though tuberculosis and dengue fever are often cited as causes. The surviving Goya continued with the ladies: at 68, he fathered a girl and because of his excessive philandering throughout his years the father of reportedly twenty children. Fearing the volatile shifts in Spain’s governments, he self-exiled to Bordeaux, France, where in 1828 he died at age 82. In 1959, Henry Koster did one of those typical glossed-over bio hack jobs with The Naked Maja, starring Ava Gardner as the Duchess and Anthony Franciosa as the 18th Century’s most acclaimed artist. At best, Giuseppe Rotunno’s photography approximates Goya’s desire to paint in fresh colors and use light very clearly. The disquieting fact is the movie was filmed in Rome and not Spain and thus the production values are more Roman-gilded than indigenous and soon the locales, sets and the generic Italian faces prompt smirks. The hollow dubbing doesn’t help, either. Scripter Norman Corwin, who did the adaptation of Irving Stone’s Lust for Life for Vincente Minnelli, sticks with the popular views of when Goya put the nude Maja to canvas and the sinister demise of the Duchess, adding the touch of Godoy explicitly ordering the poisoning. Impossible to dislike, Gardner’s so strong in her innate strutting friendliness she manages to defy bummer circumstances—such as her own tiresome MGM boilerplate performing and co-starring with Franciosa who intensely methods a part not there. (He almost loses it when he goes after one of Ava’s suitors, suggesting the intensity of his real-life affair with her was spilling over on set.) Opening credits comprised of Goya’s more celebrated works. Filmed in Technirama. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
|