Goya

This book brings together the two texts that Ivo Andric, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, dedicated to the great Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. In the first, the writer summarizes the painter's life and analyzes some of the most decisive biographical aspects to understand the style and themes in his work. In the second, Andric recreates a conversation with Goya, who appears to him on a trip to Bordeaux, the city where the painter spent his last years. And despite Goya confessing his lack of eloquence, and even claiming it as the result of his attachment to simplicity, his voice sounds clear and his speech is bright. Andric thus performed the most generous tribute that a writer can pay to a painter: lending him the words to express in another way what images can continue to reveal to us two centuries after they have been created. To verify this, the reader will only have to look at the thirty reproductions of Goya's works housed in the Prado Museum that are included in the last pages of the book.