On the trail of 'The Milkmaid of Bordeaux'

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I have visited Bordeaux again, the city bathed by the Garonne River and its famous Port of the Moon, a beautiful urban landscape declared a World Heritage Site. Cradle of illustrious figures such as the essayist Montaigne, mayor of the city between 1581 and 1585 and author of The Essays; Montesquieu, philosopher and jurist, author of the Persian Letters and The Theory of the Separation of Powers, and the writer François Mauriac. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952.

The Cervantes Institute is located in the Cours de l’Intendance and in Place des Martyrs de la Réssistence, 46, Goya painted his last painting, The Milkmaid, framed in the tradition of genre paintings that were made in the 17th century.

In the Place de la Comédie stands the Grand Theater of Bordeaux in neoclassical style with its twelve Corinthian columns crowned by twelve statues, the nine muses and the goddesses Juno, Venus and Minerva. It was designed by the architect Victor Louis 1731-1800 and was conceived as a temple of the arts. It opened with the work Atalia, by Jean Racine, and premiered works such as the ballet La Fille Mal Gardée, considered one of the oldest works in the classical repertoire. In 1871, it served as the National Assembly of the French Parliament.

The Plaza de Quinconces is presided over by the monument to the Girondins, a group of French deputies who, accused of being conspirators during the French Revolution, were guillotined in 1793.

This monument is made up of a pillar that measures 43 meters high and is crowned by an allegory of freedom breaking the chains. On both sides two monumental fountains dedicated to the Republic and Concord. In the same square there are two sculptures in honor of Montesquieu and Montaigne.

The remains of Montesquieu (18-1-1689, Bordeaux, 10-2-1775, Paris), rest in the church of Saint Sulpice. Enlightened French philosopher and jurist, he developed the theory of the separation of powers.

He was a great traveler, he visited Germany, Italy, Austria and lived for two years in Great Britain, where, unlike France, the constitutional monarchy had already been established. It was these experiences and the inspiration of John Locke (1632-1704), doctor and philosopher, father of political liberalism, that led him to formulate the theory of the division of powers in 1784, in his book The Spirit of the Laws, one of the most influential in the history of Law, which had to be published in Switzerland to avoid the censorship of the Government of Louis XV.

His thought is framed within the critical spirit of the French Enlightenment, which accepted religious tolerance, the aspiration for freedom and the concept of happiness in the civic sense.

As a disseminator of the Constitution and theorist of the separation of powers, he is very close to the thought of John Locke, while as the author of the Persian Letters he could be close to Saint Simón (1760-1825), theorist of industrial society and precursor. of socialism.

Montesquieu’s thought has its own personality to become one of the most influential thinkers in the history of political doctrines.

Michel de Montaigne (28-2-1533, 13-9-1592, Château de Montagine in Bordeaux). French philosopher, writer, humanist and moralist of the Renaissance, author of the Essays and creator of the literary genre known in the Modern Age as the essay. It has been classified as the most classic of the modern and the most modern of the classics.

Montaigne is one of the most influential thinkers in history. His essays deal with education, teaching, scholasticism, friendship, death, vanity and science. His influence can be seen in Blaise Pascal, François Mauriac, René Descartes, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Sand.

He was mayor of Bordeaux for several years. It was at this time that he met his great friend Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563), French writer, author of sonnets, Latin verses, translator of Xenophon and Plutarch and author of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.

Once retired from public life, he spent most of his time alone with his books. His disciple was Marie de Gournay (1565-1645), poet, philosopher and philologist, author of The Equality between Man and Woman and Ladies’ Wrong. She was the one who, upon her death, would be in charge of publishing the third edition of his essays. Of Friendship represents one of the most thought-out and best-crafted essays.

Walking on the way to the Cervantes Institute, we arrive at the Cathedral of San Andrés, a beautiful gilded copper virgin surmounting its spiers and pinnacles and a grandiose interior adorned in a mature Gothic style of images, sculptures and light.

We continue to the Museum of Fine Arts. The museum has a collection of 3,000 works, with paintings by Perugino, Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Picasso and Delacroix.

Wandering through the mesh of small streets in an old bookstore I find a beautifully bound copy of François Mauriac (10-11-1885, Bordeaux; 9-1-1970, Paris), novelist, poet and philosopher. I discovered his work Knot of Vipers in my father Amadeo’s bookstore in Coso Zaragozano. I found it to be an implacable portrait of humanity that made me think of Dostoevsky.

The characters in his novels are torn between their desires for purity and their passions. He was a member of the French Academy, which awarded him the Grand Prize for Novels in 1925 for his work The Desert of Love. He was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952.

Mauriac, isolated from the literary circles of Paris, admired the “divine” poets Rimbaud, Baudelaire and the great French moralists, Pascal and Montaigne. He feels the need to portray the environment in which he has grown up, the bourgeois, family and rural society of the Landes. He says that “he does not describe, nor observe, but remembers and memory is the engine of his art, the search for him.”

It exposes the conflicts of human beings based on religious and social traditions. It considers sexuality as a fundamental element in the development of man and above all the confrontation between passions and faith from a tormented Catholic perspective. The desert of love is a beautiful narrative, between passion and infatuation, guilt and the hope of forgiveness.

Continuing our route we arrive at La Cours de l’Intendance, where the Cervantes Institute is located, on whose façade there is a medallion that remembers the painter Francisco de Goya, the work of Mariano Benlliure.

We went up to the library named after Antonio Buero Vallejo, winner of the 1986 Cervantes Prize. The center promotes Spanish culture through courses, conferences, exhibitions and cultural meetings. It has more than 13,000 documents.

We arrived at the 18th century house at Place des Martyrs de la Resistence 46, where Goya (03-30-1746, Fuendetodos, 04-16-1828, Bordeaux), resided with Leocadia Zorrila and their two children until his death. He worked tirelessly on drawing his drawings and perfecting his graphic work. As Oscar Wilde said, “art cannot be taken or left, it is necessary to live.” It was here that he painted The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, one of his best and most mature works.

Francisco de Goya was a great artist. Always innovative, he managed to anticipate all the pictorial movements that appeared in Europe from romanticism to surrealism, passing through impressionism and expressionism. He is therefore considered “Father of Contemporary Art”.

In his youth he traveled to Italy and discovered Italian art with his own eyes and worked intensely. He returns to Madrid and gets a job designing cartoons for tapestries and, little by little, thanks to his obvious talent, he reaches the Royal Court as a chamber painter with Charles II and Charles IV. There he has access to the painting collections of the kings and, above all, of Velázquez.

He cultivates all genres, highlighting portraits and his traditional scenes that capture the Madrid of the time. He never abandoned popular themes and in them he mixes the most trenchant social criticism with the most sophisticated anthropological study, without an idealistic vision that he distorts, where the ethical message that he contributes is important. For Goya, painting is a vehicle for moral instruction.

He also made works with erotic themes that caused him some displeasure with the Inquisition, such as The Naked Maja. As a “reporter” he also made innovative paintings about the historical moments he was experiencing, such as The Executions of the Third of May. With these paintings he set both an aesthetic and thematic precedent for the genre, not only limiting himself to portraying historical events, but also achieving a universal message.

In 1819 Goya painted The Last Communion of San José de Calasanz for the chapel of San Antón of the Pious Schools in Madrid. With this religious painting, Goya says goodbye to the Court. Then will come the black paintings of the Quinta del Sorado and finally he travels to France.

Because of his deafness, Goya closed himself in, became sullen and lonely, but in return he painted the best of his production with new and risky works such as the brilliant Black Paintings: The Fates, Duel with clubs, which prelude expressionism. almost 100 years before he was born.

It was in his exile in Bordeaux that he painted The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, one of Goya’s best and most mature works. It represents the image of a young milkmaid with an apron, a scarf on her shoulders and a scarf that holds her hair and with a jug of milk. She gives the impression that she is sitting on a mule and her face reveals an expression of melancholy.

The small juxtaposed brush strokes stand out in the painting, this free brush stroke that the author uses. Light tones predominate, both gray and greenish, with a pink primer background. That loose, light, almost transparent brushstroke is trying to fix an instant, a moment, all the instantaneity, the immediate perception of the objects in all their purity.

This artistic moment of Goya’s has been described as a certain reconciliation with life, a new youth. New touches of color appear that prelude impressionism.

It was completed months before his death. In it, like Beethoven with his Choral Symphony of the IX, Goya seems to recover from the pain, bitterness and crises suffered and expresses himself with a joy and joy that emerges from the most intimate part of his spirit and crowns an entire life. dedicated to art.

With The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, Goya achieves a particular and eternal splendor that we can admire in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Goya, restless with his eyes always open, deaf and octogenarian, left us a great motto, written by his hand: “I’m still learning.”