Francisco of the Bulls

Besides being one of Spain's greatest painters, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was an ardent aficionado of the bullfight. He sometimes signed his name "Francisco de los Toros," and he claimed to have faced the bulls himself in his youth. At 69, after a lifetime of watching the recurring drama of blood, grace and courage, Goya set out to do a pictorial history of the bullfight. The result was a magnificent series of etchings called La Tauromaquia.

The etchings traced the development of bullfighting from its beginnings among the ancient Spaniards who fought in the open country, through the heyday of such distinguished amateurs as the Cid and King Charles V, and up to Goya's own time. One of his best scenes from the early days of bullfighting shows a group of toreros harassing with spears and a primitive banderilla a defiant bull that has downed two of their number. Another dramatic moment is captured in Goya's picture of the death of Pepe Illo, a popular 18th century matador and friend of Goya, who was killed in the Madrid bull ring in May 1801. Goya pictures Illo down before the bull, his hands grasping feebly at the tearing horns. In this, as in all the etchings, Goya seemed to stop the action with a camera's precision in its most exciting fraction of a second.

The first commercial edition of the 33 etchings of the Tauromaquia (Goya himself printed only a few copies in 1815) did not come out until 1855. A second edition was printed in 1876. Limited to 400 copies, it sold like wildfire, but a repeat printing was impossible because the plates were lost. They were found again in 1915, and a third and a fourth edition were printed. Finally, the plates disappeared once more during the Spanish Civil War, and it was feared that they had been destroyed in the fighting. In the last few years, the price of a set of the etchings soared to $2,500.

Earlier this year, however, an official of Madrid's Circulo de Bellas Artes, cleaning out the club's storerooms, found the plates again, hidden among bags of coal, pieces of broken furniture and ruined statuary in the basement. Last week the plates were cleaned and readied once more for the presses. The Circulo will put out a fifth edition of the Tauromaquia, limited to 500 copies, to sell at $1,000 a set.

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