El Madrid del siglo XVIII a través de La Pradera de San Isidro de Francisco de Goya

Abstract

In this sketch for a tapestry, one of Goya's most beautiful, we are offered the human aspect of Saint Isidro's day. With his remarkable intuition, he could convey the vividness of the people, as no other artist could. Not surprisingly, this sketch has been compared to the one act comedy of the same title, written by Ramon de la Cruz. Both the picture and the play, belong to the Madrid of the Rococo period, depicting some features of Spain's optimism during the reign of Charles III, and a society that was going to disappear after 1789. In any case, in 1788, when Goya painted this picture, he didn't intend to portray life as it really was, but just the charm imbued in it. It wasn't until a few years later, after the artist's face to face encounter with the upheavals of his day, that he made a new artistic departure. From hereon, his range of topics became radically different from the ones presented in his sketches for tapestries.