This volume is beautiful to look at and richly illustrated, with more than a hundred color illustrations.

He delivers 155 letters in new translations, i.e. about half of the surviving letters of the artist Francisco de Goya, who was born in 1746.

The focus is on the mostly early letters to his close friend Martín Zapater, with whom Goya went to school in Zaragoza.

The contact did not break off until Zapater's early death in 1803, although the letters decreased even after 1792.

In addition, there are business letters, courtly requests, academic letters and statements, supplemented by a few that were published during Goya's lifetime.

The edition of the respective letter is documented, the epilogue by Norbert Miller honors the undertaking – a corpus of this kind has never existed in German before – and provides an overview of Goya's life.

The Zapater letters, that's what makes them so appealing, are written unreservedly, sometimes playfully rude, sometimes obscene.

They are supported by permanent affirmations of friendship.

Zapater's replies have not survived, but it is clear that each rendered small services to the other, with Goya being the slightly greater beneficiary.

He worked in Madrid, the merchant Zapater stayed in Zaragoza, where he was extremely successful.

Since Goya's family, parents and siblings continued to live in Zaragoza, Zapater acted as an intermediary, above all he regulated Goya's finances through investments and share purchases.

A certain gravity

What do we get from noticing this exchange?

Little for Goya's work, a lot for the atmosphere.

That Goya was ambitious, that he carefully planned his steps up the courtly career ladder, that he was proud of his successes and that he had choleric traits – that was known beforehand.

How offended he could be, however, and that he did everything possible to make up for an experienced misfortune, is elucidated in his Zapater-reported description of the dispute over his fresco contribution for a dome in the pilgrimage church of the Holy Virgin del Pilar in Saragossa in 1780/81.

His brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu and his son Ramón worked alongside him.

Bayeu, who had brought Goya to Madrid, was in charge of the fresco work as the higher-ranking court painter.

He had accepted Goya's design for the dome,

However, Goya turned to the Church Council with a long explanation of the course of events: Bayeu was only concerned with his, Goya's, subordination, he was denounced as stubborn and proud.

That should indeed be the case, but at its core it is about a fundamental artistic dissent.

If one compares Bayeu's with Goya's dome paintings for del Pilar, it becomes clear that Bayeu seeks to combine baroque illusionism and neoclassical figurative language, no wonder, since Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Anton Raphael Mengs were both employed at the Spanish court and competed with each other.

Tiepolo's painting of the sky with figures seen from below, disappearing from the earthly spheres, and Meng's tightly assembled body – this mixture was unacceptable to Goya.

His figures – here, as with his carpet designs, he could not escape a certain classicism, as he explains to Zapater – sit at the edge of the dome on clouds as if on soft sofa cushions and do not really renounce the earthly.

The baroque apparatus, even where he quotes it, has become alien to him.

The carpet designs for the royal castles should appear relatively easy.

But compared to the drafts of his comrades-in-arms, Goya's pictures also have a certain earthiness.