TORÉADORPainting by Roby Marelly.
The title of my article takes the side, in the context of the pictorial popularity of bullfighting, certainly on the side of the bulls, which, in the long course of the narrative of art history, have been immortalized by many of the greatest masters of all time, as the winners or losers of the bloody and unfair public spectacle in question. In fact, even though I am an ardent animal activist, I still cannot close my eyes and avoid talking about a subject, which, though questionable, has extremely fascinated excellent painters not only more typically Spanish, such as Goya and Picasso, but also American, French and English, who have narrated its characters, developments and tragic conclusion, in which, alas, it is either the human or the animal side that meets the most feared woman ever: that skeletal figure armed with a scythe and clothed only in a black cloak...Thus, referring in a second moment to the above-mentioned artists, as well as to the figures of Mary Cassatt, Anthony Whishaw and Edouard Manet, we can begin by introducing to the nefarious topic, highlighting how bullfighting means a type of bullfighting, which, already popular with the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans, involved the staging of races, fights or hunts with bulls and other cattle, the practice of which was probably discontinued, at least in Italic territory, thanks to the providential intervention, dated 1567, of St. Pius V, who, with his bull De salutis gregis dominici, sanctioned that those who participated in bullfights automatically incurred the penalty of excommunication. If the Italians demonstrated a premature and noble respect for animal lives back in the day, the same attitude is still slow to materialize in other countries, which, such as Spain, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Bolivia, and even parts of southern France, continue to enact the exhibits without any shame. In any case to be the best known is the Spanish event, whose bullfighting goes back as far as 800 A.D., in addition to the fact that there are documented records of bullfighting festivals in Cuéllar (Segovia) as far back as the year 1215, although the closest bullfighting as we know it today is dated only 1400. Having finished the somewhat moralizing, critical, and extremely "pet friendly" premises, I proceed to talk about bullfighting through three pictorial points of view, ready to capture: the characters, the space, and the extreme consequences...
CITANDO-1 (1998)Painting by Scaramuix.
The characters: the protagonists of the story
I found it rather limiting, tedious and academic to collect descriptions of works of art depicting the most typical arenas filled with spectators, as well as animated by the aforementioned fights, preferring a research activity, aimed at unearthing paintings that highlight the individual actors of the much-discussed event, such as: the bullfighters, the animals and the audience. Regarding the first subject, I found what I was looking for in the masterpiece dated 1873, and titled After the Bullfight, by Mary Cassatt, depicting a bullfighter in a relaxing cigarette break, now far removed from the spectacle and violence of the "ring." In this context it is interesting to point out how the man in question was depicted in an attitude, which, somewhat swaggering, seems almost to allude to his fresh victory in the field. On the subject of animals, on the other hand, Picasso's skillful brush intervenes, ready to immortalize, in the oil Bullfight of 1934, a bull attacking a fallen horse, an act rendered by means of a brutal violence, the result of rather "primitive" stylistic features, surely born of that direct observation, which the Spaniard had matured by participating in many events of a similar nature. On the other hand, when it comes to the focus on the audience, enriched by the presence of a typical "caballo de picar," i.e., an horse specifically trained to face the charges of the bull in the first part of a bullfight, we must call upon Anthony Whishaw's Corrida (1955-56), a masterpiece in which the much-discussed crowd of spectators takes shape, which, realized by means of a pricipally brown and ochre oil painting, is done in a "landscape" format divided horizontally by the presence of a railing, cleverly arranged to separate the people from the aforementioned terrified horse.
MATADOR (2021)Painting by Rudolf Rox.
The arena: space and the extreme...
The above could take place in a context similar to that immortalized with skill and extreme precision by Francisco Goya in Bullfight in a Divided Ring, oil on canvas, which, along with many of the artist's other paintings and prints, analyze the theme of bullfighting, in this particular case showing an arena divided into two parts, both dominated by the presence of a bull, multiple bullfighters and an audience, which, observant, is aimed to appear, both energetic, and composed, which stimulates the viewer almost to perceive shouts, choruses, or simple chatter, to be imagined exclusively in Spanish. Such a tale must inexorably end with the death of one of the two competing factions: in the case where it is the bullfighter who leaves his life, at least in this world, we appeal to the vision of Édouard Manet, while if the unfortunate one is the bull, reference to Picasso is a must. I'm talking about The Dead Man (1864/65) by the French master and Dying Bull (1934) by the Spanish painter, the first masterpiece actually immortalizes the end of a bullfighter's days, evidence of a period, in which Manet was largely influenced by Spanish painters such as Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, as well as by the theme of bullfighting. Dying Bull, on the other hand, proposes the figure of a dying bull, captured in a rather brutal and bloody manner, whose "realism" is probably given by the fact that the artist's father took the painter to observe bullfights since 1889, that is, when little Pablo was only nine years old. Having reached the end of the story in question, it is possible to enrich what has already been partly addressed by juxtaposing it with contemporary reality, which is well exemplified by the bullfight-themed paintings by Artmajeur artists such as: Raúl Rubio, L.Roche and Jean-Luc Lopez.
MATADOR (2022)Painting by Raúl Rubio.
Raúl Rubio: Matador
A bullfighter, captured inside an arena of colorful fragments, appears to dance, moving those typical steps of a dance, which, led by tension, adrenaline, as well as the will to win and survive, make him dodge, step by step, the horns of a rather enraged bull, whose nostrils cast unrealistic streaks of red color, probably due to the blood of some of his wounds. What is visible makes us "regret" the now lost primordial relationship that once authentically existed between man and animal, now definitively traceable to the ancient image of the daredevil caveman. With regard to the latter, it is interesting to highlight how he was in fact already linked to a kind of primordial form of artistic representation of bulls, subjects whose depictions would seem to have arisen almost simultaneously with art itself, as is evident, for example, from excavations at Çatalhüyük in Anatolia, a site dating from 6700-5650 BCE, where temples adorned with bull heads, as well as furniture and pillars composed of stylized bull horns, have been brought to light. While the objective in bullfighting, however, is to drive away and kill the bull, in this context the animal was seen in a rather beneficent way, that is, as a life form capable of warding off evil, a peculiarity that was also matured later on, just as is evident from the pairs of human-headed bulls that were commonly carved as protective creatures on the porticos of important buildings of the ancient Sumerians and in Assyria. Nonetheless, in the same reality of prehistoric Europe and the ancient Middle East, the cult of bull-killing was also quite widespread, a reality in which the animal, a symbol of strength and fertility, was also often the protagonist of wall-mounted fight scenes.
TORO DE CALLE - GOUACHE/INKS/ PANEL - BULL (2019)Digital Arts by L.Roche.
L.Roche: Feria POP
L.Roche's bull, portrayed in the foreground with stylistic features unmistakably dear to Pop art, but decisively actualized by the language of digital art, becomes a humanized subject, almost as if it could represent the effigy of an ancient and proud member of the family, an image necessarily to be shared in the living room, to be shown to neighbors, friends and various guests, to evoke, with an attitude of boasting, the ancient glory of the lineage, which in this specimen reached its maximum power and virility. Here, this description makes us understand all the multifacetedness of the artistic subject matter in question, which, for example, by artists such as Picasso, was dissected through multiple styles and media, among them, that of drawing, an occasion in which the movement of the animal was emphasized, achieved through messy lines, where the body, sometimes upside down, was always ready to rise again. In addition, one cannot fail to mention that the same mammal also appears in the artist's most iconic work, namely Guernica, a context in which the animal becomes the symbol of Spain and its traditions, but also, referring to the tradition of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, the transposition of the eternal struggle between instinct and rationality, between sacrificial vulnerability and destructive impulse, between defense and attack, life and death, surely inherent in the war to which the work famously alludes.
31 CORRIDA 2 (2019)Painting by Jean-Luc Lopez.
Jean-Luc Lopez: 31 bullfighting 2
Jean-Luc Lopez's ink on paper tells us about a precise moment in the bullfight, sacinto by those repeated, elusive and close encounters between bull and bullfighter, which make viewers hold their breath, who, among other things, perhaps ask themselves: do man and animal cross their gazes during the performance? Probably yes, and, in the stregue of two lovers, when this happens the play, like time, stops for a very long and intense instant, in which the animal and human souls touch each other, recognizing each other as similar, because they are animated by the same fear of losing their lives. Perhaps Francisco Goya's multiple depictions of the subject matter in question were also dictated by a kindred desire, aimed at revealing the secret of that sensation of the exchange of souls, which the Spanish artist investigated in his Tauromaquia (1816), a series of 33 prints, which, made mainly through the techniques of etching and aquatint, show generally violent scenes, set in the space of the arena and rendered in the forms of the bold gestures of the two similar opponents. The perspective investigated by these prints takes into account the viewer's point of view, as the framing is rendered by referring to him taken to observe the scene from the stands, just as if he were eternally curious to grasp the mystery, which unites the souls of the victim and his executioner.
Olimpia Gaia Martinelli
