The Crisis of the Spanish Enlightenment: Capricho 43 and Goya's Second Portrait of Jovellanos

Abstract

FOLLOWING A CENTURY OR MORE OF GESTATION, Spain experienced, especially during the reign of Carlos III (1759-1788), a period of enlightenment in literature, art, religion, commerce, agriculture, and indeed in every aspect of human endeavor. The Ilustracion was different, in most cases, from the Enlightenment in other countries. Las luces were not necessarily the same as les lumieres.1 What is strikingly different is that the French Enlightenment culminated in 1789 in the Revolution and then evolved into the Napoleonic period. Spain, after the death of Carlos III in 1788, experienced twenty more years of Bourbon rule, and then the old regime collapsed in the face of the Napoleonic invasion. What happened to the Spanish Enlightenment in that critical period? Two works of art-an etching and a portrait-are visual keys to understanding the decline of the Enlightenment in the Spain of the ancien