The third of Goya's print series is Tauromaquia, whose first edition was published and offered for sale in 1816, 'in the print store on Calle Mayor, opposite the house of the Count of Oñate, at 10 rs. vn. each, separately, and at 300 id. for each complete set, made up of 33'. The series proved to be a resounding commercial failure. It transpired that nobody wanted to buy images — whatever their unquestionable beauty and their formal and technical complexity, depicting atrocious violence — in which the most pleasant and picturesque aspects of bullfighting were not shown. As a result, Goya was left with most of the edition.

As in all his series of engravings, Goya approached the subject with his characteristic intensity. Although Goya was a bullfighting enthusiast in his youth, this series of prints raises considerable doubts as to his feelings about the fiesta in the years following the War of Independence. Each of the compositions contains a note of violence and tragedy, placing them in the critical and aesthetic ambit of his previous series, particularly the drama of his Disasters of War, dating from the same period. When Goya made Tauromaquia, between 1814 and 1816, his own personal situation was extremely delicate. The restoration of King Ferdinand VII brought renewed political absolutism and ideological censorship, banishing any hint of the liberalism that had characterized the artist's early period. With most of his friends either dead or in exile, and with hardly any pictures being painted at court, Goya turned to a theme that might at first sight appear recreational, a parenthesis and a refuge for the now elderly painter to evoke the days of his youth and give free rein to his creative capacity. However, if we look more closely, we once more — as in the Disasters — see the themes of violence, cruelty and death. It is difficult to know precisely why the painter undertook this type of work, but it would be easy to speculate that his motives were financial. Goya was going through a difficult patch and this was the only subject, together with religious art, for which there was any demand. Whatever the reason, when Goya had engraved the collection and tried to sell it, he found that there was hardly any activity on the Madrid print market. Since 5 May, 1814, prior censorship had been reinstated and the Inquisition Tribunal had been reestablished. From this perspective, the theme of the collection might appear appropriate for an artist wishing to bring in some income, given that bullfighting had experienced a resurgence during the reign of Ferdinand VII. Nonetheless, in his work Goya echoed the debate on the legitimacy of bullfighting currently raging in enlightenment society: Some of the leading intellectuals of the day, including Jovellanos or Vargas Ponce, had come out in opposition to the so-called 'fiesta nacional'.

As is so often the case with Goya's work, he was not driven by one single factor; rather, the ever-receptive artist absorbed different aspects of his milieu. Some of the aspects that may have lain behind his decision to undertake the work were his possible early interest in bullfighting, the restoration of bullfighting during the war, the success of a series of prints on the theme (such as Antonio Carnicero's Colección de las principales suertes de una corrida de toros (1787-1790)), not to mention the possibility of some extra income He may also have been motivated by a desire to give free rein to his feelings of repulsion at all forms of violence by way of a subject that had no apparent political charge and was the object of an ideological debate.

As with his Caprices, for which he borrowed ideas from literature, Goya drew primarily from three literary sources (although in no case did he attempt to illustrate the texts): the Carta histórica sobre el origen y progresos de las fiestas de los toros en España (1776), written by Nicolás Fernández de Moratín; the Tauromaquia o arte de torear a caballo y a pie (1796), written by José de la Tixera and probably dictated by the bullfighter José Delgado, 'Pepe Hillo', whose second edition, in 1804, was illustrated with prints on the different passes, and José Vargas Ponce's Disertación sobre las corridas de toros (1807), which, although unpublished at the time, Goya may have read in manuscript form, since Goya painted the author's portrait. These were the three main sources in the literature on bullfighting in the years leading up to Goya's production of the series. Moratín traced the history of bullfighting back to its origins among the first settlers of the Iberian Peninsula; Pepe Hillo described some of the main phases of the bullfight, and Vargas Ponce, in the most documented of the three studies, not only offered a scholarly history, but also set out the ideological bases for a critique of the practise.

Goya did not make the series in the chronological order in which it was subsequently published. He began by depicting events from his own time, and then moved on to historical scenes. In addition to the 33 scenes in the first edition, he also engraved another seven to be included at the beginning, which are still preserved on the back of some of the copper plates, but which were not ultimately included in the collection. He also made five other compositions, the plate of which is not preserved, which are known only from the print proofs. In all, then, he engraved a total of 45 compositions. Most of the preparatory drawings have been kept in the Museo del Prado since 1886, while the copper plates are in the National Museum of Engraving of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.

The prints are in chronological order, as finally published, beginning with the history of bullfighting and focusing on its origins in Antiquity, its consolidation in Moorish Spain and the chivalrous festivities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A second group depicts the passes of the bullfighters of his time or immediately before. They show a lack of uniformity in the fight, lending itself to acts of 'madness' or 'daring' (as some of the titles reflect) and feature leading bullfighters of the day, including Apiñani, Martincho, Pedro Romero and Pepe Hillo. Finally, the last group is made up of scenes that eloquently depict death from goring, ending symbolically with the death of Pepe Hillo in 1801, an event that so shocked Spanish society that it led to a ban on bullfighting.

However, far from being a descriptive graphic narrative of the past and present of bullfighting, if we examine the prints carefully, we can see them as yet another expression of the violence inherent to the human condition, a manifestation of the irrational confrontation that leads to death. Whereas other bullfighting prints of the time showed the death of the bull, Goya's prints abound in the unnecessary and irrational deaths of people. They oppose bullfighting, not out of any sympathy for the bull, but out of respect for the man who irrationally faces down an enemy that he unnecessarily provokes. Thus, the compositions in the series are characterized by their dramatic character, focusing on a representation of the brutality of the combat between man and bull. The figures are usually isolated from their surroundings, with scarcely a hint of a barrier separating them from the scared and anonymous public watching the drama unfold. And on occasions, the drama reaches them too, as in Print 21, which shows the death of the Mayor of Torrejón in the bullring in Madrid. The collection ends with the worst possible finale, the death of the hero, of the man, symbolically represented by the death of Pepe Hillo in Print 33.

This series should therefore be interpreted not as a divertimento or a historical narrative, but as yet another manifestation of the artist in his last years before leaving for France. Goya almost simultaneously engraved the Disasters of War, the Tauromaquia and the Follies, and it is therefore only logical that the three collections should to some extent overlap: the Moors in this series resemble the Mamelukes, and the dead matadors are reminiscent of the myriad corpses in the Disasters of War. At the same time, the anonymous spectators watching the passes from behind the barrier somehow seem to prefigure the anonymous masses of the Follies.

José Manuel Matilla Rodríguez