It has a very ancient origin which even touches the legendary Minotaur, devourer of humans in old Crete, the furious ‘King-Taurus’ with the hexagonal head of a beast, incapable of thinking and locked in the famous Labyrinth.

However the representation – even mental and imaginative - of a ‘Plaza de Toros’ can hardly justify the primary modality of bullfighting as the ‘law’ of human motion or unconscious, being instead a product of the History of cultures, where the other already enters degraded to a stage ornament, the Bull in fact.

In Art, Picasso makes it his coscientious and manneristic persecution because in the menacing and/or menaced guise of that ‘head-without-thought’ he puts in, from time to time, his own head, or that of the Woman, or that of the Victim[1]. Neverthless for his predecessor Goya the dark ambiguity of dementia, which he perfectly describes in the horrors of wars as well as in the laughters of ferocious children[2], far from allowing him a safe haven, instead passes into a very risky and fluid comfort-zone.

Little is still known about this culturally induced operation – degradation under threat of removal – although it is an operation which easily moves both in the individual and in History, and without fear of borders of any kind.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – April 13, 2024

In photo : the oldest Spanish ‘Plaza de Toros’ at Ronda, wonderful town in Andalusia, founded by Celts in a strategic position in the 6th century b.C., and with the Arab structure of the 11th century a.C. intact. Since 2011 in Spain the ‘bullfights’ have been legally abolished.

[1] Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): ‘The kiss’ (1925), ‘Crying woman’ (1937), ‘Guernica’ (1937).

[2] Francisco Goya (1746-1828): the series of ‘Children Games’ for the Santa Barbara’s Royal Manufacture of Tapestries (1786-1791), ‘Capriches’ (1799), ‘Disasters of War’ (1810-1820). A beautiful exhibition on Goya was recently held in Milan, ‘Goya. La ribellione della ragione‘, at the Palazzo Reale (October 31, 2023 – March 3, 2024). Interesting is also a recent graphic-novel by Otto Gabos ‘Francisco Goya. La tentazione dell’abisso‘ (2023).