Goya: Court Painter or Court Roaster?

If portraiture has a single unwritten law, it is this: the sitter must always appear handsome (or beautiful), intelligent, and possessed of great dignity.  This is simple common sense.  No one wrinkled enough to hold an eight-day rain wants to pay good money to have that image permanently recorded in oil.  In art (as in life), too much honesty can be ruinous.  Portraying folks too realistically is bad for business.

History is full of cautionary, confirmatory tales.  John Singer Sargent was all but exiled from Paris society after unveiling his portrait of Madame X.  Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill was despised by the prime minister and was later burned by Churchill’s wife.  Gilbert Stuart—whose Washington portrait is seen everywhere from classrooms to currency—lost the goodwill of early Americans after painting an unflinchingly accurate likeness of President John Adams.  Adams complained that the picture “has in it more of me than I quite like,” which may be the most polite way any man has ever said, “Good God, do I really look like that?”

Of course, the opposite problem could be just as dangerous.  Hans Holbein nearly lost his head after painting a flattering portrait of Anne of Cleves—so flattering that Henry VIII agreed to marry her, sight unseen.  When the king finally met Anne in person, he suspected fraud.  Holbein escaped prison only because Thomas Cromwell took the blame, and Cromwell (as was common with those who displeased Henry) eventually came to a far worse end.

Nowhere was flattery more desperately needed than in the case of Charles II of Spain, the last Habsburg ruler.  Claudio Coello’s official portrait tries valiantly to disguise the tragic results of centuries of royal inbreeding.  (Charles would have been less inbred if his parents had only been brother and sister.). If you compare it with a modern AI reconstruction, it’s painfully clear which image belongs in a museum and which belongs in a medical textbook.  The computer may actually be too kind.

 But to understand how royal portraiture could range from reverence to near-satire, we have to consider the two greatest group portraits in Spanish art: Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) and Goya’s Family of Charles IV (1800).  These two canvases—separated by 145 years—show not only different artistic temperaments, but two radically different worlds.

Velázquez painted at the height of Habsburg prestige.  Though Spain was beginning its long decline, the court still radiated majesty, ritual, and unshakable self-confidence.  Las Meninas reflects that atmosphere perfectly: elegant, mysterious, and composed with almost mathematical sophistication. (Click on the pictures for a larger image.)

Velázquez stands at his easel, and he’s calm, dignified, and almost aristocratic.  He wears the cross of the Order of Santiago, either painted later or anticipated by Velázquez himself.  His placement asserts the intellectual and social elevation of the artist.  He becomes nearly equal to the royal sitters, if not superior in subtle ways.

The Infanta Margarita stands bathed in soft light, attended by ladies-in-waiting, dwarfs, and a dog—all rendered with extraordinary dignity.  Velázquez elevates everyone.  Even those marginal to the court’s hierarchy are painted as individuals, not court amusements.  Las Meninas is portraiture as philosophy—the world ordered, luminous, and serene.

Goya painted the Bourbon monarchy in an entirely different Spain: one that was stagnant, anxious, and rattled by the aftershocks of the French Revolution.  Charles IV’s government depended increasingly on Manuel Godoy, the “Prince of Peace,” a court favorite whose influence far outstripped his abilities—and whose relationship with Queen María Luisa caused endless gossip.

Under such conditions, the conventions of royal portraiture begin to crack.  Goya’s Family of Charles IV is often called “the greatest group portrait since Las Meninas,” and it is—but with a decidedly sharper edge.

Where Velázquez stands tall and highly visible, Goya tucks himself into the dim left background, half-hidden, observant, and possibly judging.  His presence is subdued, almost ghostly.  The court he paints lacks the self-assured elegance of the Habsburgs.  Instead, his royals are arranged stiffly, awkwardly, like a family summoned for an emergency group photograph at the DMV.

Charles IV appears ruddy and mild-mannered, almost bovine in his gentleness.  María Luisa dominates the composition, larger, brighter, and forcefully present—precisely the impression foreign diplomats often recorded.  Goya didn’t invent the rumors about her alleged affair with Godoy:  he merely arranges the composition in a way that makes those whispers audible.

The princes and princesses are rendered honestly, without flattery.  No heroic light, no idealized profiles, no softened imperfections.  Goya paints people, not symbols (and in a royal portrait, that alone is subversive).

Goya was a court painter, meaning that his livelihood—and possibly his life—depended on royal favor.  He could not openly caricature the monarchy…But he didn’t need to do so:  Simply painting the royal family as they truly appeared was daring enough. His contemporaries would have caught every implication.

In the stiff poses, the theatrical lighting, the cluttered composition, and the glaring power dynamics, Goya offers a portrait of a dynasty pretending to be what it no longer is and probably never was.  Where Velázquez gives us natural majesty, Goya gives us the stage set of majesty—with the backstage ropes showing.

This is as close to open satire as a court painter could safely venture, and the miracle is that not only did Goya survive the experience, but he produced one of the most psychologically rich royal portraits in European art. 

Inevitably, we have to ask, “Is Goya laughing at them?”

Goya isn’t laughing at them in the way a caricaturist or political cartoonist would—but he is letting the viewer laugh—just a little—at the gap between how the Bourbons wished to appear and what they actually were.

He never crosses the line into open mockery (he valued his head too much for that), but he paints with a knowing eye…with the eye of a man who has seen too much of court life to believe in its pretensions.  His brush records every awkward truth:  Charles IV’s mild bewilderment, María Luisa’s dominating presence, the ill-arranged cluster of overdressed royals (who look more like actors in a provincial theater troupe than the heirs of the Spanish Empire).

So is Goya “laughing”?

Quietly and privately—yes.

Not with a grin, nor with a snicker, but with the wry, weary amusement of a court painter who has learned that truth sometimes mocks power simply by being shown.  His satire is not a joke at their expense:  it is the gentle, devastating humor of honesty without malice.

I Return to Enema U

When I returned to teaching at Enema U, armed with my battered backpack, a wrinkled syllabus, and the misplaced optimism of a man who has clearly forgotten all the life lessons pain once taught him, I expected the usual assortment of freshmen quirks:  Perhaps an overconfident first-generation entrepreneur major declaring, “I’m starting a sneaker-flipping business, Professor.”  Maybe a creative writing student who insists on being called only by a single cryptic initial.  Certainly a few political science majors who already know exactly how to fix the world—and will share those plans with you whether you ask or not.

Instead, what I encountered was an entirely new species: the Covert Covid Cohort.

These are the students who spent their formative academic years marinating in the glow of a laptop at the family kitchen table, while the dog tried in vain to eat their digital homework and the Wi-Fi signal valiantly attempted to fight its way through three interior walls, two appliances, and, occasionally, a large pot of lasagna.  They were educated during an era when “unmute yourself” constituted high-level pedagogical intervention.  And now they have arrived on campus in person, blinking like cave fish dragged suddenly into the punishing brightness of the sun.

The results have been—in a word—astonishing.  In more words, baffling, bewildering, confounding, and intermittently hilarious.  Let us catalogue a few notable features of this remarkable generation.

First, there is the matter of readiness.  Or, to be accurate, the complete and total absence of it.  I have watched freshmen stare in genuine shock when they discover that college involves reading.  Not scrolling, not swiping, not watching a three-minute TikTok summary performed by a man with blue hair and a ring light, but reading actual text printed on dead trees.  One student asked me, with the hushed solemnity reserved for describing natural disasters, “You mean the textbook is, like, required?”  Her tone implied that she believed I was personally responsible for this atrocity.

Then there is the confidence issue.  In the Before Times, freshmen possessed the self-assurance of Victorian orphans asking whether they were permitted to breathe indoors.  But this generation often does not recognize that their participation might be expected at all.  They have been tasked so infrequently that many assume their silence is simply another option on a menu of acceptable behaviors.  Years of endless accommodations, lowered standards, and “no one fails” policies have created students who believe the universe will grade them on a curve no matter what they do.

The problem, of course, is that they spent the pandemic years in digital isolation, communicating primarily through text messages, Discord channels, and Minecraft signage.  When they did speak in online classes, they directed their thoughts into the hygienic void of a muted microphone.  Their only audience feedback was a floating thumbs-up emoji from a classmate who was almost certainly asleep.  It is difficult to develop confidence under such circumstances.  It is difficult to develop any social skills when your most consistent conversational partner is an algorithm curating your TikTok “For You Page.”

Which brings me to the next issue: technological dependence.  These students rely on AI the way earlier generations relied on oxygen, running water, and perhaps the occasional functioning attention span.  They use AI for brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising, and, in some cases, breathing.  They submit AI-generated explanations for questions no human has ever asked.  Pose a question about the Louisiana Purchase, and they will proudly turn in a ChatGPT-composed essay explaining how France sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson in order to finance its upcoming war with the Martians.  Not one of them wonders why the textbook has failed to mention this historic interplanetary conflict.

In my colonial Latin America class, I routinely receive material about King George, the Stamp Act, and the Sons of Liberty simply because students forget to tell their AI apparitions that we are not, in fact, studying British North America.  Tools designed to enhance learning have instead become replacements for it, the educational equivalent of  hiring a butler to chew your food.

This dependence has produced an intellectual diet consisting largely of secondhand thoughts.  Many students have read nothing in its original form; they know texts only through AI-generated summaries of summaries of summaries.  I assigned a short primary document from colonial Mexico, written in 1620.  A student asked whether there was a video version.  When I explained that the document predated video by roughly three centuries, he paused, frowned, and said, “So… no video?” He sounded as though the seventeenth century had personally let him down.

Of course, this is not entirely their fault.  The conditions under which they were educated would have defeated the ancient Spartans.  A Zoom meeting is not a classroom; it is hostage-negotiation-adjacent performance art.  Teachers became digital lighthouse keepers, signaling desperately through intellectual fog banks of unstable bandwidth, faulty microphones, and teenagers multitasking themselves into oblivion.  Meanwhile, parents attempted to supervise schooling while working full-time jobs, managing a household, and wondering when, exactly, their children had begun to resemble raccoons who had accidentally learned English.  Everyone tried.  Everyone struggled.  Everyone coped as best they could.

Perhaps it is my imagination, but the male students, in aggregate, seem less prepared than the female students.  A few years ago, schools—rightly—worried about an educational gender gap and worked hard to make education more appealing to girls.  Perhaps we overshot the mark.  While there are still good male students, a noticeable number seem to have drifted away, their academic focus replaced by an unwavering commitment to video games, energy drinks, and avoiding eye contact.

And so now the bill has come due.  The Covert Covid Cohort has arrived on campuses nationwide: uncertain, anxious, unaccustomed to structure, and prone to asking whether assignments can be turned in using emojis.  They shuffle into classrooms like time travelers from a civilization that worshiped glitchy Wi-Fi and ring lights as household gods.

Yet some things remain unchanged.  Every exam still manages to kill at least one grandparent, resulting in an impassioned plea for mercy and an extension.  Every book assigned is still “the worst book ever written.”  And any reading longer than a tweet is still regarded as a Herculean labor of mythic proportions, rivaling the labors of Gilgamesh…only with fewer literary rewards.

In the end, I find myself both exasperated and amused, annoyed and empathetic.  This generation may be unprepared, but they are also resilient, strange, creative, and thoroughly modern.  They survived an academic environment held together with duct tape, glitchy Zoom links, and the collective willpower of exhausted adults.  Now they are here, in our classrooms, blinking in the light.  And no matter how much we tease them —and we will—it is now our job to teach them what schooling actually looks like.

Even if they still want every primary source to come in video form.

Turkey, Inflation, and the Art of Economic Self-Immolation (Or, A Lesson In Imaginary Numbers for Politicians)

Thirty-seven months ago, I wrote about Turkey’s “unique” approach to fighting inflation.  Under the leadership—read that as “autocracy”—of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey boldly ignored its central bank, its supreme court, the fiscal policies of the rest of the world, and generally anyone who had passed freshman economics.  The government’s big idea? Lower interest rates to fight inflation.

In the world of economics, this was roughly equivalent to Captain Smith drilling holes in the hull of the Titanic to let the seawater out.

Now, if my inbox is any indication, a few readers remain puzzled by why this policy was such a head-scratcher.  Allow me to demonstrate.

Imagine you and your spouse are on Oceanic Flight 815 flying from San Francisco to Australia for vacation.  Halfway there, the pilot announces that, due to a medical emergency, the plane must make an unscheduled stop on the tiny island of Dharma.

While waiting, the airline hands out five Dharman dollars to each of the 100 passengers to spend in the airport.  There’s only one snack bar—naturally—and it sells hamburgers for $2 each.  So, everyone heads there because, as we all know, the only place to get food better than at an airport is at a state prison.

But there’s a catch:  The snack bar has only 50 burgers.  The hungry crowd, determined not to gnaw on the armrests, starts bidding against one another.  Soon the burgers go for $4, $5, and finally, four desperate travelers pool their money and offer $20 for two burgers.  The burgers vanish faster than free donuts at a faculty meeting.

Voilà: inflation!—Too many dollars chasing too few goods.  (Or, as Milton Friedman put it, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”)

President Erdoğan, however, disagreed.  He argued that lowering interest rates would encourage businesses to borrow, expand production, and flood the market with so many goods that prices would fall from sheer embarrassment.  It’s a lovely theory—sort of a fairy tale for macroeconomists—but it only works if inflation stems from a lack of supply caused by a recession.  In our burger example, adding a second snack bar might indeed have solved the problem.

Unfortunately, Turkey’s real problem wasn’t a shortage of goods…It was a shortage of confidence.  The Turkish lira was viewed as weak, and lowering interest rates made it weaker still.  Investors dumped the lira for harder currencies, so import prices exploded and the cost of everything from wheat to washing machines soared.  Instead of producing more goods cheaply, Turkish firms found themselves paying more for raw materials and trying to sell goods to customers who could no longer afford them.

In short, Erdoğan tried to cure roaring inflation by pouring gasoline on it—and then wondered why the cost of his fire insurance skyrocketed.

Turkey began its rate cuts in March, 2021, cutting the interest rate by 5% by the end of the year.  Almost immediately, inflation began to soar, peaking at a 75% increase for 2023.  The Turkish lira’s value fell sharply: for example, in 2021, the lira lost more than 40% of its value against the dollar after rate cuts and policy instability.

Wages couldn’t keep up.  Even after multiple minimum-wage hikes, real purchasing power still fell by more than 20%.  Everyday staples—bread, eggs, and vegetables—doubled or tripled in price within a single year.  Rent in Istanbul rose 150–200% between 2021 and 2023.  Pensioners and fixed-income households saw their savings evaporate; middle-class families began skipping meat, fuel, and medicine purchases.

As the lira lost 80% of its value compared to the US dollar, there was a rush to obtain either gold or foreign currency.  By 2023, roughly two-thirds of all bank deposits were held in dollars or euros rather than lira.  Interest paid on savings accounts was far below inflation, so even people who “saved” money were effectively losing value every month.

Mortgage and consumer-credit rates were kept artificially low, fueling a real-estate bubble.  Developers built luxury flats denominated in foreign currency; as the lira collapsed, locals were priced out of the market.  Millions of renters faced eviction or were forced to move into smaller flats; informal housing (a polite way of saying slums) expanded on city outskirts.

Official unemployment hovered around 9–10%, but under-employment and informal work surged.  Small-business owners faced skyrocketing import costs for raw materials and energy, wiping out profit margins.  Doctors, engineers, and young professionals—those who could afford to leave—emigrated in record numbers.  An  estimated 450,000 Turks left between 2021 and 2024, seeking economic stability abroad.  While crowds queued for subsidized bread lines, municipalities set up “people’s markets” to sell basic foods below cost, forcing even more privately-owned stores into bankruptcy. 

The average Turk endured a massive transfer of wealth from savers to borrowers, from the poor to the politically-connected, and from the middle class to exporters, who earned in foreign currency.  Inflation didn’t just change prices—it reshaped lifestyles, savings habits, and social expectations.

One of the perks of being an autocrat is that you never have to admit you have been wrong. Officially, President Erdoğan still insists that he was right all along and that the rest of the planet simply misunderstands economics. After gliding to reelection in 2023 (no shock, since Turkey’s electoral playing field is about as flat as Dolly Parton) he quietly shuffled his cabinet, installed new economic ministers, and—without quite mentioning it—let interest rates climb.

While Turkey’s experiment in economic alchemy was spectacular, it’s hardly the only country to have tried sheer financial lunacy dressed up as innovation.  History is littered with governments that decided the laws of economics were merely “guidelines.”  Argentina, for instance, has spent decades proving that you really can default on the same debt more than once.  (Something the current president, an economist, is finally correcting.)

Venezuela tried financing utopia with oil money and ended up discovering that printing currency faster than you can count it does not, in fact, create wealth.  Even the United States, during the seventies, thought it could outlaw recessions by fixing wages and prices—an idea that lasted about as long as polyester suits and pet rocks.

Politicians everywhere seem to believe they can outwit arithmetic.  Some imagine that if they just “stimulate demand,” prosperity will bloom like a spring flower.  Others insist that cutting interest rates to zero will make productivity leap from sheer gratitude.  None of them ever ask the grocery clerk what happens when money loses value faster than lettuce wilts.

So, while Erdoğan’s monetary adventures deserve a chapter in the textbook of terrible ideas, he’s in good company.  Every nation, given enough hubris and a printing press, eventually convinces itself it has discovered the economic perpetual-motion machine.  It never works, of course, but on the bright side, it gives economists something to write about—and provides comedians steady income.

In the 11th century, King Canute ruled England, Denmark, and Norway—a résumé impressive enough to make anyone’s courtiers a little sycophantic.  When they began insisting that his royal power was limitless, Canute decided to make a point.  He had his throne carried to the edge of the sea, sat down, and with due ceremony commanded the tide to retreat.  Naturally, the water ignored him and soaked his royal ankles.  Turning to his followers, the king declared that all earthly power is limited…even a monarch’s.

Over the centuries, the tale of Canute has been mangled beyond recognition so that, instead of a wise ruler teaching humility, he’s remembered as a pompous fool yelling at the surf.  Yet modern politicians seem to have drawn an entirely different moral: no matter how preposterous your message, repeat it often enough and with enough confidence, and someone, somewhere, will believe the tide really will turn back.