José Delgado: La Tauromaquia

Written in 1796 by the legendary bullfigher José Delgado, colloquially known as Pepe Illo, La Tauromaquia is the first documented handbook for bullfighting. It was a source for the series of etchings of the same title, by Francisco y Lucientes Goya first published in 1816, in which he famously depicted Pepe Illo’s fatal goring by the bull Barbudo as the final plate in the suite. Picasso, a life-long lover of the corrida de toros, knew and admired Goya’s La Tauromaquia. However, where the former’s imagery highlights the brutality and violence of the mortal struggle between man and beast, Picasso’s rendering evokes its poetry. Following the bull from the tranquillity of the field into the bull ring, Picasso charts the course of the numerous encounters between the torero and the bull. Executed directly onto copper, he produced all 26 plates in one sitting, using a sugar-lift solution of ink mixed with syrup applied with brush. The scenes are rendered with an extraordinary economy recalling the fluid precision of Chinese brush paintings. Each pass of the bull and torero is reduced to its essence, focusing the eye on the pivotal flourish of a cape or lunge of the torero’s sword. Leaving large areas of the sheet empty, Picasso uses the contrast between the black figures and the white ground to suggest the brilliance of the noonday sun. The cover, the only plate executed in drypoint, features a kite flying over a bull in a landscape, a visual pun referencing the publisher’s imprint Ediciones de la Cometa, cometa meaning kite in Spanish.