The [Il]legibility of Character: Gesture, Costume, and Identity in Goya

While recent scholarship has focused attention on the body, the complicated relationship between clothing or costume and identity merits a sustained analysis in Francisco Goya\u27s art. This thesis explores the various meanings of fashion current in eighteenth-century Spain, a time period in which fashionability was a source of instability, both in terms of the contemporary debate on luxury and adornment and in terms of Goya\u27s work and life. Clothing is considered as one of the key performative aspects of identity. Central to this thesis is a discussion of the uncertain gendered status and legibility of the petimetre, a fashionable fop often ridiculed for his foreign and effeminate trappings, as viewed through the intersection of popular culture and costume. In particular, Goya\u27s Magic Mirror drawings become a means to understand some of Goya\u27s self-portraits, as well as Goya\u27s choice to underscore ambiguity in his sexually charged depiction of hermaphrodites. Drawings are examined as examples of visual thinking that expose an artistic process that can be thought of as performative, a concept that is explored in relation to gesture, costume, and identity. Many of Goya\u27s drawings and prints engage with notions of performance both in terms of ritualized behaviors of seeing and being seen in Spanish society and also in terms of Goya\u27s artistic “performance,” his response to Spanish artistic tradition