Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveArt fact

In the early 1820s, Francisco Goya painted fourteen dark murals straight onto the walls of his house outside Madrid. He never titled or exhibited them; they became known later as the Black Paintings.

Madrid, 1819–1823

ArtHistory

The story behind the card

Goya bought the farmhouse in 1819, in his seventies, and had been almost completely deaf since a serious illness in the early 1790s. The house was already known as the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man's Villa, after an earlier owner who was also deaf. On its plaster walls he painted scenes such as Saturn Devouring His Son, and left no word about whom they were meant for. When he left Spain for Bordeaux in 1824, the murals stayed on the walls. In 1873 the banker Baron Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger bought the house, and from 1874 the restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells transferred the flaking paintings onto canvas. D'Erlanger gave them to the Spanish state in 1881, and they now hang in the Prado.

Türkçe oku
Francisco Goya, 1820'lerin başında Madrid dışındaki evinin duvarlarına doğrudan on dört karanlık resim yaptı. Onlara ad vermedi, hiçbir yerde sergilemedi; resimler sonradan Kara Resimler adıyla anıldı.
Madrid, 1819–1823

Goya bu kır evini 1819'da, yetmişli yaşlarındayken satın aldı. 1790'ların başında geçirdiği ağır bir hastalıktan beri neredeyse hiç duymuyordu. Ev, yine sağır olan eski bir sahibi yüzünden zaten “Sağırın Evi” anlamına gelen Quinta del Sordo adıyla biliniyordu. Goya sıvalı duvarlara Oğlunu Yiyen Satürn gibi sahneler resmetti ve bunları kimin için yaptığına dair tek söz bırakmadı. 1824'te İspanya'dan ayrılıp Bordeaux'ya yerleştiğinde resimler duvarlarda kaldı. Evi 1873'te bankacı Baron Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger satın aldı; 1874'ten itibaren restoratör Salvador Martínez Cubells, dökülmeye başlayan resimleri tek tek tuvale aktardı. D'Erlanger resimleri 1881'de İspanya devletine bağışladı; bugün Prado Müzesi'nde sergileniyorlar.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Black Paintings
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveArt

Vivian Maier, a nanny in Chicago, photographed the city's streets for decades and showed almost no one. Her negatives surfaced at a storage-locker auction in 2007, two years before she died, and she is now counted among the great street photographers of the twentieth century.

A young estate agent and collector, John Maloof, bought a box of her negatives for about $380 while researching a local history book. He found striking, humane street photography and began posting scans online in 2009, shortly after her death; the response was immediate and international. Maier had left many rolls of film undeveloped, sometimes for decades, and told the families she worked for almost nothing about her photography. Exhibitions, books and the Oscar-nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier (2013) followed. The case also started a lasting debate, and a court dispute over her estate, about whether work its maker never chose to show should be printed, exhibited and sold.

Art historyRead card
StillnessArt

Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican between 1508 and 1512 standing on a tall wooden scaffold with his head tilted back, not lying down as is often imagined. The ceiling, about 35 by 14 metres, holds more than 300 figures.

Pope Julius II commissioned the ceiling. Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter and accepted reluctantly; the contract was signed on 8 May 1508. He rejected the first scaffold, which hung on ropes through holes in the vault, and had a freestanding one built instead. His early biographers Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi both say he worked standing, and Vasari describes the discomfort of painting with his head bent backwards for so long. The lying-down version comes from another writer of the time, Paolo Giovio. Michelangelo is thought to have joked about the strain in a comic poem to a friend, with a sketch in the margin of a figure painting overhead. The ceiling was painted in fresco, on patches of fresh plaster laid each day, and the modern restoration mapped each of these daily sections. It was unveiled on 31 October 1512.

Art historyRead card
DriveArt

Hip-hop began at 1970s block parties in the Bronx, New York, where DJs used two turntables to repeat the drum breaks of records so that people could keep dancing.

Hip-hop is often dated to 11 August 1973, when Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, played at a back-to-school party his sister Cindy held in the community room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Herc had noticed that dancers went wildest during the break, the short stretch of a record where the singing stops and the drums and rhythm take over. With two copies of the same record on two turntables, he switched from one to the other to stretch the break for minutes. Dancers who waited for it became known as b-boys and b-girls, and MCs began speaking and rhyming over the beat, which grew into rapping. DJs such as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa took the ideas further.

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureRead card
DriveArt

Motown, the record label Berry Gordy founded in Detroit in 1959, made its records in a converted house called Hitsville U.S.A. Between 1960 and 1969, 79 of its songs reached the American top ten.

Berry Gordy Jr. had worked on a Detroit car assembly line and written songs before he started Tamla Records in January 1959 with an 800-dollar loan from his family; the company became Motown Record Corporation in 1960. In 1959 he bought a former photography studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, turned the back into a small recording studio and moved his family upstairs. Songwriters, producers, the house band later known as the Funk Brothers and coaches who taught stage manners all worked under one roof, and a weekly meeting voted on which recordings to release. The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder came through the house. As a Black-owned label, Motown won huge white audiences at a time when American radio and charts were still divided by race.

GRAMMY Museum / Motown MuseumRead card
WonderHistory

A griot is a West African storyteller, musician and oral historian who carries memory through performance.

In Manding languages a griot is called a jeli or jali, and in Wolof a gewel. The tradition is tied to the Mali Empire, founded in the 13th century by Sundiata Keita: in the Epic of Sundiata, the griot Balla Fasséké advises the young king, and the Kouyaté family of griots, who trace their line back to him, still perform today. The role usually passes down within griot families. A griot learns genealogies, histories and praise songs by heart, often performing them with the kora, a 21-string harp-lute, the balafon, a wooden xylophone, or the ngoni, a small lute. Griots have also served as advisers to rulers, go-betweens in disputes and keepers of a community's memory of who is related to whom.

The Metropolitan Museum of ArtRead card
Next card in the archiveMichelangelo was still carving the Rondanini Pietà, a marble of Mary holding the dead Christ, shortly before his death in 1564 at eighty-eight. The phrase 'ancora imparo' ('I am still learning') is traditionally attributed to him, though the attribution is not firmly documented.Read next →