GOYA NETWORK

The lecture by Paula Fayos will first explore Francisco de Goya's influence on 19th-century French art and literature, and the mechanisms that enabled the dissemination and reception of his work. Drawing on Fayos Pérez's recent book, the talk examines how French audiences interpreted Goya as an embodiment of exotic, literary Spain, as well as a caricaturist, a politically engaged artist who rebelled against authority. The book also presents the first catalogue of the copies of Eugène Delacroix after Goya's Caprichos.

This research revealed hundreds of individuals—artists, writers, collectors and patrons—who acted as intermediaries, interpreters and promoters of Goya's work. A direct product of this scholarship, the Goya Network, brings these figures to the centre of the analysis. Developed from over a decade of art-historical research, now combined with tools from Digital Humanities, the Goya Network is an interactive, collaborative database that visualises the personal and professional relationships among all these agents linked to Goya—so far focused on Spain and France. From the Madrazo family to Victor Hugo's cenacle and the Parisian salonnières, the platform maps the sociability structures that built Goya's legacy. Continuously expanding, the Goya Network aims to become a standard research tool for scholars, curators, lecturers and students.

Event in English and chaired by Manuela B. Mena Marqués.

Paula Fayos Pérez holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Cambridge (2019), funded by a Leslie Wilson Scholarship (Magdalene College), supervised by Jean Michel Massing. Her doctoral thesis has recently been published as Goya's Caprichos in Nineteenth-Century France: Politics of the Grotesque (CEEH, 2024). She worked as a researcher at Apsley House (London) and has since held various postdoctoral positions funded by NextGenerationEU, the BBVA Foundation (Leonardo Grant), and currently the Gerda Henkel Foundation. During these fellowships, she has taught at the universities of Strasbourg and Madrid (Complutense) and organised the international seminar Goya: Grotesque/Collecting (2023). Recently, she has delivered lectures at the Musée Delacroix in Paris and the Museo del Prado (Programa Joven 2025), and has published in academic journals such as The Burlington Magazine, Boletín del Museo del Prado, and Print Quarterly.

Manuela B. Mena Marqués holds a PhD in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on Italian drawing and painting. She has organized and participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, among which the following stand out: Murillo (1982, in collaboration with the Royal Academy, London); Monsters, Dwarfs, and Buffoons at the Court of the Habsburgs; Goya and the Spirit of the Enlightenment (1989, with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Velázquez (1990); Ribera (1992); Goya: Caprice and Invention. Cabinet Paintings, Sketches, and Miniatures (1994, in collaboration with Juliet Wilson-Bareau); Manet at the Prado (2003); and Francis Bacon (in collaboration with Tate Modern, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

She served as a member of the Board for the Classification, Valuation, and Export of Heritage Assets of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and has been a member of ICOM and of the Scientific Committee of the Musée Goya in Castres (France) since 1981. She is also an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Fundación Goya en Aragón, and, since 2010, a member of the Advisory Committee on Visual Arts of the Botín Foundation.

She taught at the Autonomous University of Madrid and simultaneously collaborated with the Museo del Prado on the publication of its collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian drawings. In 1981, she obtained, through a competitive civil service examination, the position of Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Prado Museum, where she served as Deputy Director for Conservation and Research from 1986 to 1991 and as a member of the Royal Board of Trustees from 1991 to 1996. She subsequently held the position of Head of Conservation for Eighteenth-Century Painting and Goya until 2021.

She has received several distinctions, including the Silver Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts, the Encomienda of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, the Encomienda of the Order of Civil Merit, the rank of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In 2019, she was awarded the Prize of the Friends of the Prado Museum Foundation.

She currently resides in London with her family and continues to be engaged in research on specific topics in Art History, as well as in delivering lectures in her field of expertise.