> <i>Scary, selfish, violent, superstitious, and frail: that is humanity.</i><p>This quote is from the middle of the article, when it pivots and tries to demonstrate that Goya didn't grow into a pessimist but was somehow one from the start. Or something. The point of the article isn't very clear, to me at least. Goya was a witness "clumping", and clumping is inherently unstable. And so is life?<p>In any case, it's hard to look away from the painting of Saturn Devouring His Son, as is hard to escape the observation about the evils of humanity. Maybe that vision was with Goya from the start, or maybe it came to be in his later years. But now it's there.
From the article…The standard interpretation, such as there is one, is that Goya had become disillusioned with almost everything by the time he painted the Black Paintings.<p>Maybe. But it has also been observed that Goya’s decent into darkness coincided with his decent into deafness. Suddenly remove from a man the ability to perceive speech, and life is in danger of looking like a pointless masked ball, a look that seemed to characterize his later work.