A richer portrait of Goya

“Goya’s Portraits” is a lesson in the virtues of small. The exhibition includes just 10 paintings and one diminutive drawing -- a charcoal self-portrait -- by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), but it carries more satisfactions than any number of shows five times its size.

For one thing, it illuminates a major painting that the public owns. The San Diego Museum of Art is home to an exemplary 1795 Goya portrait of an imposing Spanish aristocrat, “The Marquis of Sofraga,” which for nearly 70 years has been among the most important pictures in its permanent collection.

Recently it was lent to a large Goya survey at Mexico City’s National Art Museum. That gave SDMA director Derrick Cartwright and curator Steven Kern a bright idea. At the end of the Mexican show, why not bring to San Diego nine other Goya portraits, also borrowed from American museum collections, before they returned to their respective institutions?

“Goya’s Portraits,” assembled to create an illuminating context for the San Diego picture, is the happy result. The paintings are gracefully installed in a single gallery on the museum’s second floor, where they hang on plum-colored walls. You can sit on a bench in the center of the room and take in the array. The setup couldn’t be simpler, but it’s designed for indulgence.

With Goya, that’s a good thing. He’s a sumptuous painter -- not in a flashy or ostentatious way, but in the thoroughly sensual methods with which he seduces a viewer. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish king, Carlos IV, and knew full well how to provide the necessary opulence the court demanded. But he also used that sensual indulgence as a path to something deeper -- to a richer, more ambiguous territory of human feeling.

Look around the room and you’ll notice a subtle compositional device repeated almost every time. The subjects of Goya’s portraits are usually shown in three-quarter view, their heads turned slightly in space, with the eye closest to the viewer just about smack in the vertical centerline of the canvas. The remainder of the picture is organized around this staring eye -- the one that connects with your own.

This linkage lets you project an unfolding consciousness into the otherwise immobile image. Goya didn’t invent the contrivance (a staple of portrait painting during the Renaissance), but he manipulates it brilliantly.

Typically the subjects are presented before a monochrome background, not posed in a descriptive setting. The imposing Marquis of Sofraga is surrounded by a rich olive green with yellowish overtones. There is deep peacock blue for Felix Colon de Larriategui, eggplant for the celebrated matador Pedro Romero, and steely gray-blue for an unidentified young woman wearing a sheer white mantilla with silver and gold trim.

Rather than locate the portrait subject in a specific place that might illuminate social station or personality -- a palatial office for the marquis, say, or a dressing room for Romero -- Goya instead uses clothing, personal accouterments and facial expression as cues. The sitter’s body, plus the things he or she uses, are what matter most.

As a result, even though seven of the 10 paintings have an air of formal occasion about them, with the subjects on display to the world, intimacy is palpable. These are distinctive portraits of individual people with singular lives, not representative types.

The monochrome backgrounds enhance rather than distract from this focus. That’s part of their deferential function. Yet these fields of gorgeous color are anything but blank or passive. Instead their chromatic opulence invites your eye to luxuriate -- just for the plain, irrational pleasure of it.

Of course, Goya also chooses background colors to enhance the richness of the painting’s palette. The Marquis of Sofraga is a rococo splendor, as befits a grandee -- all creamy white, gold, silver and robin’s-egg blue. Notably, the red collar and ribbon at his throat and the red sash around his waist are both tamped down with pink. He’s a vision of soft refinement, framed in magnificence against the olive green background. Power is conveyed as polished, cultivated elegance.

In some pictures, the color even propels the metaphoric narrative. Romero, for example, assumes a casual pose, but wrapped in a cape and satin vest of complementary purple hues, he’s been done up in the colors of a pope or king. Romero was a virtual matinee idol in late-18th century Spain -- arguably the greatest bullfighter ever -- and Goya’s princely color scheme befits his exalted reputation as a legendary national hero.

Meanwhile, the discordant clash of his purple cape’s red lining adds abrupt visual drama to the sporty “royal” portrait. It also adds a crucial, almost shocking insinuation of the mortality of the flesh: The cape’s blood-red inner lining is composed like a gash in the painting’s body. Romero is deified, but this god is human.

Goya is a technician of supreme skill. Even as early as the 1780s, when he was still in his 30s, he was gaining renown as an incomparable portrait painter. The canvases in the San Diego show were all made later, ranging from 1790 to 1815, and in most of them he’s working in top form.

Yes, he can be perfunctory, as demonstrated by the pedestrian full-length figure of a Peruvian landowner posed before his estate and flanked by an adoring dog, whose upturned snout pokes above the distant horizon to likewise direct your deferential gaze toward his master. (The composition recalls Gainsborough.) But even perfunctory Goya can be guaranteed to include remarkable passages.

Take the disconcerting orb of wispy golden light hovering at the Peruvian’s side. On closer inspection it’s nothing but the interior lining of the tricorn hat the gentleman holds in his hand. But slowly it dawns that this radiant orb is a secular halo, poised to anoint his head.

In the portrait of the marquis, that technical acumen can be seen in the rendering of his foreshortened right arm and hand -- a difficult pose that Goya pulls off effortlessly. His powers of observation are acute. He had gone stone-deaf about two years before painting this portrait -- he suffered intense fevers from an illness that has never been satisfactorily diagnosed, and deafness was the result -- and it’s sometimes suggested that, as a mature artist of 47, suddenly being cast into a silent world enhanced his ability to see life as an expressive pantomime.

Whatever the case, he turns the skill to stunning effect here. The marquis’ hand is not resting on the book that lies open on the desk before him. (The book and desk are standard attributes of learning, appropriate to the subject’s role as director of the Royal Academy of History.) Instead it hovers just above, with the index finger slightly forward and the little finger grazing the page in liftoff.

With exquisite subtlety, Goya shows the marquis engaged in a simple act, about to gesture in the painter’s -- and our -- direction. With the exalted Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece dangling from the pinkish red ribbon at the impressive grandee’s neck, an otherwise small and modest action expands into an imminent command. Whether artist or observer, we are all disclosed as his subordinates in the 18th century Spanish scheme of things.

I’ve seen this magical painting dozens of times over the years in the San Diego Museum’s permanent collection galleries, but I’ve never seen it in quite this way before. But then, that’s the virtue of small: With an artist of Goya’s blinding brilliance, it helps you stare into the light.

*

‘Goya’s Portraits’

Where: San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays

Ends: June 18

Price: $4 to $10

Contact: (619) 232-7931; www.sdmart.org