El Coloso - Attribution

Attribution

In June 2008 the Museo del Prado issued a press release in which Manuela Mena, Chief Curator of 18th-Century Painting and Goya, stated that the painting was «with almost complete certainty» the work of the painter Asensio Juliá who was a friend and collaborator of Goya. The analysis undertaken in January 2009 concluded that the painting was the work of one of Goya’s disciples without being able to state for certain that this person was Juliá.

The Goya expert Nigel Glendinning rejects the idea that the picture was painted by Asensio Juliá, stating that the arguments supporting Mena’s views are «totally subjective» and that the brush strokes that Mena claims are the signature «A. J.» are actually the first digits of the inventory number 176 that is visible in old photographs of the painting. It is also possible to see other numbers in these old photographs such as the number 18 that is alluded to in the sentence «A giant with the number eighteen» used in a description of the painting A Giant which was the name used for the painting in the inventory of Goya’s works carried out in 1812 after the death of the painters wife Josefa Bayeu. In 2012 Jesusa Vega published an article entitled «The Colossus is by Francisco de Goya» in which she shows how the strokes of various figure eights drawn by Goya correspond to those visible on “The Colossus.” Vega rejects the basic premise that initially threw doubt on Goya’s authorship of the painting. In addition, she shows that the other findings of the study carried out by the Prado have all indicated that the picture was painted by Goya; these included the analysis of pigments and binders, assessment of the artistic techniques used and the theme and composition of the painting along with its similarity to Goya’s other Black Paintings. Then in 2009 the Art Historian Valeriano Bozal, after seeing Mena’s press release, stated that «the report is not conclusive». and he later unsuccessfully tried to hold a congress of international experts with the objective of arriving at a consensus, declaring in June 2010 that «Goya’s authorship has been removed on the basis of weak irrelevant evidence. The heritage of the painting has been mutilated without conclusive evidence». Other scholars, restorers and former directors of the Prado have indicated that they disagree with Mena’s hypothesis.

On the other side of the argument Manuela Mena refused to definitively conclude that the letters A. J. were the signature of Asensio Juliá, one of the main arguments supporting the attribution of the painting to the Valencian painter. In March 2009, Nigel Glendinning and Jesusa Vega published an article in the academic journal Goya entitled A failed attempt to delist The Colossus by the Prado Museum? in which they question the methodology and arguments of Mena's report:

In summary, the arguments in favour of delisting The Colossus put forward in the report are not only unconvincing but ultimately they are scandalous due to the errors made and the sophistry used. To publish a document of this type under the protection of the Prado, as if that institution had already accepted its conclusions, is a seriously misguided move that calls into question the trust that society places in the Museum.

Ever since 2001 Juliet Bareau-Wilson and Manuela Mena have questioned Goya’s authorship of the painting, postulating that Goya’s son, Javier, painted it. In addition, they attribute The Milkmaid of Bordeaux to the goddaughter of painter Rosarito Weiss. However, in an article entitled The problem of the allocations from the 1900 Goya Exposition Nigel Glendinning and the then director of the Museo del Prado Fernando Checa, reject these claims. In 2004 Nigel Glendinning also published an article entitled Goya’s The Colossus and the patriotic poetry of its time, establishing the relationship between Goya’s ideas regarding the giant represented in the picture and the literature that aroused patriotic fervour in a population that had survived the war provoked by Napoleon's invasion of Spain. This conjunction of ideas would not have existed if The Colossus had been painted later, which is an argument that Glendinning uses to refute Bareau-Wilson and Mena's hypothesis. This hypothesis tries to distance the painting from the inventory of the estate of Goya’s wife, Josefa Bayeu, on her death in 1812. The inventory lists a painting with the same dimensions as The Colossus, which is called A Giant and which has traditionally been identified as the same painting.

In July 2009 Spanish universities and numerous Goya experts signed a declaration in support of Nigel Glendinning, defending the use of the scientific method in the study of art history and attributing The Colossus to Goya.