The friendship that existed between Goya and David has called attention to the similarities in the temperament and the aims of the two men, whose work was so widely different. Both used their brushes to glorify the throne and received honours from kings; both sacrificed tradition on the altar of new ideas; and both lacked the tenderness and the faith necessary in the treatment of religious subjects. David was the friend of Robespierre and Saint Just, of Marat and Buonaparte; he painted the ‘Coronation of the Hero of the Pyramids’; he attended the Convention and voted for the death of Louis XVI. Goya was the friend of Godoy and of the ministers of Joseph Buonaparte; he painted the pictures of the Usurper as well as those of the kings that preceded and followed him; and he executed ‘The Disasters of War’ and ‘The Caprices.’ David was ambitious for the aggrandisement of his art, and Goya strove to make it worthy of its civilising mission, but they differed in the means by which they sought to attain their respective ends. David was inspired by the antique, and produced works which possessed the hardness of statuary as well as its clear-cut accuracy of form, while Goya went direct to nature for his inspiration, and his paintings are the reflections of naked reality. The painter of ‘The Death of Socrates’ was imbued with the guiding purpose of making his work dignified, elaborately accurate, and exclusive, while the author of the frescoes of La Florida, drawing inspiration from the customs of the toilers and the dandies alike, held that ‘a picture is finished when its effect is true.’ David represented man endowed with improbable and unattractive virtues, Goya painted man as he was; David idealised the individual form with classic grandeur, and his austere and solemn compositions, though based on observation of nature, were moulded to a fixed external idea; but Goya was as faithful to psychologic truth as to anatomy, and his brush revealed the moral sentiments of mankind and laid bare the passionate and terrible emotions of the human soul.
When Goya returned to Madrid in 1775 Spanish art was directed by Mengs and Tiepolo, by Maëlla and Francesco Bayeu. Mengs, the ‘reasoning artificer,’ who had neglected the world of nature in his servile study of Raphael and the antique, was a painter who theorised much and invented little. According to Richard Cumberland he was an artist incapable of portraying either life or death; a painter whose creations neither terrify nor inspire passion or transport; a timid, conscientious craftsman with an excellent hand for miniature. Yet Mengs, the ‘Spanish David,’ as we are told by José de Madrazo, was regarded by the youth of his time as ‘the regenerator of the antique,’ and from the dictatorial chair of pictorial art, his voice ‘was heard like that of an oracle, not so much by the artistic cohorts of agitated Germany, where he received little attention, as by the peaceful Italo-Spanish pleiades, who applauded with enthusiasm the exhumation of the Hellenic form from among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, because it was the fashion, and without comprehending the reach of that fortuitous event.’