No Bull: the Corrida in Art and History

Death of the Master, by José Villegas Cordero (Spain) 1884

​No Bull: the Bullfight in Art and History
 
Spain in 2019 was a whirlwind of art, with one religious experience after another. Gaudi’s Sagrada, and the Antoni Tapies museum, for starters; Picasso’s Guernica, coined by a fellow artist friend as “one of the real seven wonders of the world.” But it is in Seville that I see the painting that will stay with me and get under my skin, a work I encountered for the first time in its natural habitat at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Seville. 
 
Jose Villegas Cordero’s Death of the Master, 1884, is a massive painting, 129 x199 inches. I count 24 life size figures gathered around the master matador in repose. It’s an astonishing piece of complexity, resplendent with detail, the glittering jewels of matador costumes on most of the gathered, their lean and muscular dancer’s bodies artfully arranged. The composition is flawless, opening to the viewer on the body of the master matador, as if we are standing there in the throng to mourn or pay our respects. The palette is sublime: murky green and greige for the concrete walls, with the bright white sheet over the supine master to draw us dead centre. Splashed overtop of the stark white sheet is a satin or silk chemise, pale peach, feminine. Our eyes move around to catch the red coat of the figure on the floor in the bottom left-hand corner, curious as he tenderly sorts the matador’s personal effects, including the delicate little slippers. The priest is shrouded in black. The mourners dazzle in shimmery golds, braided trousers, blues, purples, expertly muted. 
 
The story goes that this work took 15 years to complete.
 
Villegas Cordero was a painter of genres, historical narratives, Orientalism, and costumbrista works. His work stands out from peers stylistically however, for an irresistible blend of raw, almost abstract gesture and texture, mixed with meticulously detailed and skillful draughtsmanship. His palette was idiosyncratic, too, managing a tremendous range of colours somehow corralled into a subdued overall effect. 
 
It’s a stunning painting, inspired by Manuel Fuentes Bocanegra, a Spanish matador who didn’t actually die until 1889, five years following completion. Bocanegra was gored in the stomach and died of infection after, at the age of 52. 
 
The romantic dramatization  captures the reverence of Spanish culture towards the symbol of the matador, the beauty, the artistry, and the solemnity, too,  the reality of death. 
 
**  

The Dead Toreador, by Edouard Manet (France) 1864

It was my idea. The bullfight. I'd been reading too much Hemingway, and I'd fallen hard for Mexico. 
 
I'd been drawn in by Picasso and his peers: the bullfights were as integral to the creative intelligentsia and to bohemia as the cafes and disreputable absinthe parlours. And Manet's painting, The Dead Toreador, had cut me from the inside out. It's a brilliant painting, using a bold perspective that positions you standing over the corpse. The chiaroscuro heightens the drama. 
 
In the fall of 1865, Édouard Manet traveled to Spain. He wrote a letter to poet Charles Baudelaire, describing a bullfight he attended in Madrid as “one of the finest, most curious, and most terrifying sights to be seen.”
 
I kept finding my way back to the painting. It was hard to look away. 
 
I'm not overly disturbed by my occasional bloodlust, if one wants to call it that. Reality is bloody as much as is beauty.  One way of reconciling the paradox is accepting it.
 
Another trait is that I take every opportunity for experience, regardless of my personal tastes or proprieties. I am curious about everything. Nosy. As an artist and writer I want to experience different things, to bear witness to everything I can. It is fascinating to watch people in their many habitats, observing what they do and trying to understand why they do it. 
 
I had missed bullfight season  when I was in Mexico City. La temporada takes place for a specific time frame from November to March, the opposite of Spain, which runs March to October. There are few countries left where the age-old gladiator sport is still legal.  Peru is one of them, so when I was planning a visit to Lima in 2016, I asked my friends to get me a ticket. 
 
I knew even then, before going, that it would be a one-shot deal for me. It would be the first time, and the last. 
 
I knew I would witness something terrible and epic. That I would be part of an ancient spectacle soaked in blood and roses.  
 
**
 

Taurobolic Altar to Cybele (France, former Roman Empire) 160 AD

The modern corrida tradition dates to the early 1700s, spreading with Spanish colonialism to Latin America, where it was enthusiastically received. But variations of bullfighting trace back through Spain’s history, with appearances in written chronicles in the early 1100s. It was enjoyed by kings, peasants, visitors, and invaders. There are parallels to a variety of hunting games and spectacles in different cultures from Africa to Asia. Parallels have also been made to games and rituals where humans tortured and sacrificed other humans, which were shockingly commonplace everywhere, from Rome to Mexico to the west coast of Canada, with some suggesting that the animal came to stand in place for older atrocities. Perhaps. 
 
The oldest known mention of bullfighting is in the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose stories date back as far as 2100 BC, with a scene where Gilgamesh and Enkidu fought and killed the Bull of Heaven: "The Bull seemed indestructible, for hours they fought, till Gilgamesh dancing in front of the Bull, lured it with his tunic and bright weapons, and Enkidu thrust his sword, deep into the Bull's neck, and killed it." 
 
Various mystery cults involved stories about killing bulls, or real-life practices. Tauroctony was an essential mythology in the worship of Mithras in classical antiquity, with depictions of bull killing in every Mithraeum, or temple. In turn, these ideas were borrowed from the even older Persian cult of Mithra, the lord of light, who was ordered by the sun god to sacrifice a bull. He did so reluctantly, but at the moment of death, creation of the moon, stars, skies, and earth was realized. The dead bull’s blood and seed fertilized every creature on earth, making us alive and sacred. An old Mithraic hymn declares, “Thou hast redeemed us too by shedding the eternal blood.”  
 
Such gruesome rites were not man’s domain alone. The taurobolium was the cultic practice in the Roman Empire of massacring bulls to the Magna Mater (the Great Mother). Her priests would baptize themselves in the blood of the beast, then leave the bull’s testicles as an offering. This strange gift of virility stood in for previous rites to the goddess when she was known by the name Cybele, and her priests castrated themselves in her honour. Mother was worshipped as the goddess who stood on the thresholds between the known and the unknown, the civilized and the wild, and the living and the dead. 
 
Today we continue to purge manifestations of our pagan past. The bullfight has been banned around the world, surviving today in only eight countries. In Portugal, the sport has been modified to outlaw the killing of the bull. Last year, Mexico also changed the rules towards a bloodless bullfight. Colombia is moving towards a ban as well. In France, the practice prevails legally in only a few historical regions. Protests between animal welfare groups and aficionado activists in favour of cultural preservation are ongoing in the few remaining places that practice the corrida, Spain, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru. 
 
**

Plaza de Toro, Lima, Peru, photo by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2016

The matador. He is nineteen years old. He is taut and haughty and heartbreakingly beautiful in his elegant lime green satin capris. He strikes a pose, and then another, and then another. The song "Vogue," by Madonna, runs through my mind. He is smooth and sequined and his carefully choreographed elegance, his entrega, is pure artistry. But there is something raw and primal there, too, a jolt of bitter and addictive testosterone. He is very skilled, but even a rookie like me understands what this is all about: his very youth is at risk of being conquered. 
 
Andres Roca Rey might die in front of our eyes. He can disappear in the blink of the crimson magician’s cape. 
 
He is a sand mandala, a beauty that could be snuffed out in a whoosh of our collective sense of temporality. 
 
Yes. For him, for us, the fact he is staring death in the balls is exactly why we are here.
 
**
 
It is horrible. We are horrified.
 
The crowd screaming. A sea of men, and row after row of women in their finest maquillage, waving handkerchiefs. 
 
We watch as the carcasses are dragged out of the arena after each victory. The crowds cheer wildly. The whole thing is an affront to my Canadian cultural delicacies. It is inconceivable to me that humans would subject an animal to such cruelty and scream for it. 
 
There are vestiges of this primal behaviour in other contexts, of course, in hockey and football, in our taste for grisly murder dramas on Netflix. These sociological phenomena bring our brutal past to light: sport was once about throwing men to the lions or gladiators fighting to the death. In Mexico, an ancient kind of Mesoamerican soccer, ōllamalīztli, known for 3500 years, ended with the losing team (and sometimes the winning team) losing their heads to appease the gods and restore the order of the universe. Some reports show subsequent matches using the heads of the sacrificed ones. Such games were so popular that more than 2000 ballcourts have been excavated.
 
The enduring popularity of the corrida be damned, from where we sit, it is senseless brutality. Thousands of us have gathered to participate in the killing of the bull. Ruddy-faced, tubby men; young labourers; old aunties with walkers and even wheelchairs; emo youth with guyliner and lashes as black as the night water of Barranco. Every square inch of real estate in the stadium is occupied.
 
My friend next to me says, "I almost wish it is not the bull who loses."
 
This is the dominant emotional response from the modern, progressive perspective.  
 
American female matador Bette Ford said, “In one era the majority puts its faith and sympathy with the bullfighter, in another with the bull.”
 
I nod in agreement with my friend, but realize in an instant I'm a fraud because I don't share this view. Roca Rey is barely just a man out there, vulnerable, dangling a gauzy swatch of fuchsia before a steaming thousand pound monster.

If one outcome is heinous, the other is even worse. 
 
The bull had no choice in this. This is true, and it is barbarism.
 
But the matador, I grudgingly respect. 
 
He is putting his money where his balls are. 
 
He is standing there before the beast we are all here to kill.
 
He is risking his own life. and we risked nothing but a few centimos and a headache from too much sun. We are safe in our seats, tidy, protected, basking in the luxury of the higher moral ground. 
 
In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway said, “It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could.”
 
The matador puts his life at stake.

But we are here for the same thing he is. We have paid to witness it. The death of this magnificent creature.
 
**

Roca Rey of Peru is from a “taurine family.” His older brother Fernando is also a matador. His uncle was an ejoneador, a bullfighter on horseback. His grandfather worked in the Peruvian bullfighting administration.
 
Roca Rey started in the arenas at the tender age of seven. As I sit ringside, he has just this year gained the status of full matador.
 
He has already been gored countless times. A sensationalist headline in The Sun proclaimed him the “World’s Worst Matador.”
 
My friend’s brother, who got the tickets for me, says this is nonsense. Roca Rey is already well-known and admired for taking extreme risks. His artful aesthetics are apparently unparalleled. Markos says that injuries reflect the daringness of the matador, the chances he is willing to take. They show that Roca Rey is fearless. Newspapers that deride such injuries as failure do not understand the obvious danger of taking on an angry 900 pound beast. But the matador we behold understands it very well. 
 
Markos tells me that at his last appearance, Roca Rey was stabbed in the buttocks. He was also gored in the mouth on another recent occasion, with several teeth knocked out. Both times, he swallowed his agony, and returned from the wings to take his enemy down.
 
Indeed, by 2021, Roca Rey appears in an interview with Christopher North in The Critic Magazine. North says he is “arguably the best torero in the world, and unarguably the most popular.”
 
Not every kid wants to be gored by a bull when he grows up. I am repulsed and awestruck. It is a war crime to place a child in the face of death this way, and everyone who attends these affairs, including me, are guilty of atrocity. But I also tremble to consider the depth  of the passion of this thing, this longing. 
 
To be a matador is a vocation, a calling, a sort of possession. It is extreme sports or religious extremism, or both. 
 
"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death," Hemingway famously stated. The sentiment echoes something my late husband said about his favourite sport, boxing. He loved it because it was a real fight, not a reenactment. The appeal of smashed zygomatics and mandibles and brain damage eluded me, but for a certain kind of person, the edge of the cliff is the most honest way to approach the truth about life. To grapple with reality and destiny. It is not a game. To truly understand that we are alive, we must face death head on. 
​
This perspective can help us understand what drives a matador, and why the spectacle appeals to sold out audiences across time. It’s not that the criticisms of animal cruelty and human rights fall on deaf ears. It’s that those are the obvious. You can’t stop the wars between man and nature, between gods and mortals, by wishing them away. The bullfight is not about killing bulls, not really. It is about life and death.

​No matter how often he prevails, the success of the matador is a temporary triumph.
 
**

In his memoir, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death, now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.”
 
Hemingway visited Spain and attended his first bullfight in the ‘20s. He was so taken by the experience that be became a lifelong aficionado of the sport. He even participated in bullfighting himself, in amateur events. 
 
Hemingway’s wife had suggested around this time that he transition from journalist to novelist. The Sun Also Rises is a book that explores the bullfight and its attendant moral questions, contrasting traditional masculine moral values with the emerging new mindset of the 20s. Hemingway examines life, death, tradition, and the relationship between men and women.
 
Hemingway’s hardboiled, adjective-averse literature was widely admired but has less acclaim today, often viewed as prominent examples of the old boys’ school known as “toxic masculinity.” 
 
I confess to finding Hemingway’s flat, Spartan prose tedious at best. But his philosophical consideration of the bullfight as a mythic reflection of those subjects most central to the human conundrums of living and dying bely the notion that such a brutal sport is a meaningless one.
 
Hemingway’s understanding of the corrida as a spectacle rooted in complex confrontations with the most essential questions of our existence was one shared by his friend with whom he attended the fights, the bullish artist Pablo Picasso. 
 
Born in Malaga, Spain, Picasso regularly accompanied his father to Sunday fights from a young age. He viewed the corrida as a core part of his Spanish heritage. Picasso’s first known painting is The Little Yellow Picador, depicting a bullfighter on horseback. It’s an exceptionally sophisticated painting considering it was rendered at eight years old. 
 
It was a theme that Picasso returned to over and over. The corrida is the subject of at least 100 of his paintings. In 1970, just a few years before his death, he painted a series of matador works, including several of himself in the role, illustrations of a man wrestling with his own imminent demise. Aside from his most repeated subjects, the women he loved or loved to hate, perhaps the corrida was the theme with which Picasso was most consumed.
 
Picasso saw the bull as symbolic of the unconscious mind, the inner animal and mystery with which me must all contend. In the violence of the drama of the bullring, he saw the mythic come alive, beauty, tragedy, and ritual. For him, the bull represented passion and sexuality, a raw force of eroticism. 
 
Picasso viewed the bullfight as a spectacle harkening back to the days of the minotaur, a mythology of man as half-bull. He saw himself as the mythic minotaur, an emblem of sexual power, instinct, violence, and irrationality. 
 
Viewed from this perspective, the bullfight then becomes something other than man defeating death. It becomes man’s battle against his own sexuality and nature.

​It becomes a symbol of man against himself.
 
**

The Little Yellow Picador, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1889

The Bullfight, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1934

Self Portrait as Matador, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1970

An intellectual alliance and camaraderie between Picasso and Hemingway is unsurprising, given their parallel brutal personalities and reputations. 
 
The friendship between the thundering, virility-obsessed Picasso and the urbane, effete aesthete Jean Cocteau is perhaps an unexpected one. The polymath Cocteau was lanky, aquiline and utterly romantic. Referred to as The Frivolous Prince by his peers, after the title of his early poetry collection, his creative output spanned novels, drawings, plays, films, ceramics, paintings, wit, erotica, modelling and choreographing surrealist photography, and an avant-garde, performative approach to the world, infusing drama into everything he was and did. He saw everything in art and daily life as connected to mythology and the epic highs and lows of tragedy and comedy. He insisted only on calling himself a poet and all of his vast creative output as poetry, whatever its form.
 
Cocteau was a fervent admirer of Picasso’s gate-crashing approach to art, viewing the driven, passionate Picasso as a formidable genius. He persuaded Picasso to design sets for the Russian Ballet in the ‘20s, bringing the avant-garde into the classical. Picasso, with his usual megalomaniac self-absorption, was unable to see anyone, least of all a flamboyant homosexual, as his equal, and accused Cocteau of sycophancy, mocking him in an interview. This led to a two decade rift in their friendship.

In time, the pair reconvened. They were often seen seated together at the bullfights.
 
Cocteau shared Picasso’s views of the corrida as ritual participation in ancient mythological drama. High tragedy had followed Cocteau since he was nine, when his father shot himself in the head.. Cocteau became obsessed with the subject of death, constantly incorporating classic myth tropes about death and the underworld into his creative work. His life and work embodied the idea that beauty and death were inextricably linked, opposites dependent on each other for meaning.
 
Tauromachie, for Cocteau, was poetry itself, a space for the contemplation of the most profound mysteries. It was a form of ancient ritual and a fatalistic art form. The spectacle of the corrida was living myth. An aesthete to his core, the choreography and costume of the toreros were of deep significance to him. The artistry of the matador’s dance was essential, a ballet that was willing to lose itself in the ultimate sacrifice. Art to the death, complete surrender to destiny.
 
For Cocteau, of course, the eroticism of the corrida was not just about machismo or even symbolism. As a connoisseur of male beauty, the matador was less a stand-in for the idealized male self, but an object of erotic desire. 
 
To the Spanish, the role of matador was entrenched in the perception of hypermasculinity. This seems strange to outsiders who see the obvious archetypes of femininity intertwined with the macho: the matador is beautiful, elegant, balletic, and graceful, with sequins and ornament that reflect women’s fashions. The dressing of the matador in his traje de luces (suit of light) is itself a ritualistic ceremony. (Does the suit of light harken back to Mithra, bull slayer and god of light?) The enigmatic costume is skintight, heavily embroidered and tasseled, with zapatillas (little slippers) and pink or white silk stockings. 
 
The sense of the feminine alongside the masculine was so strong for me that I wondered if the secret of the corrida had been hiding in plain sight all along: that like Cybele, it is the female who ultimately tames the bulls, and who vanquishes death while personifying life.
 
In any event, it is no stretch at all to see the artful, idealized, perfected, prettified male as a source of erotic attraction for women and gay men. Cocteau depicted countless matadors and bullring dramas in his artworks. His trademark line drawings highlight the grace and dazzling beauty of the matador, and the intimacy of the dance and struggle with the animal. 
 
 
**
 

Picasso in white, Cocteau in tie beside him, at bullfight.

Matador, by Jean Cocteau (France) 1961

 
If the torero represented masculinity and virility, it makes sense that women share Cocteau’s ardent admiration for the erotic male bodies and the archetype of the matador. The matador has long enjoyed a kind of rock star status, easily attracting the attention of women. Pop icon Madonna expresses female desire in this context in her 1994 video, Take a Bow.
 
In this ballad, she plays the lover of Spanish bullfighter Ernesto Munoz, so obsessed with the corrida that he neglects his wife. She celebrates the aesthetic of the torero and his dance, intersplicing sensual, contrasting scenes of his rippling adorned buttocks and thighs with her own soft lingerie, cleavage, and curves. She writhes in needy ecstasy, he moves in an eternal erotic dance, as the drama plays out between them and her rival, the bull.
 
Madonna’s work grapples constantly with the personal and political portrayals of female desire, exploring the subject from every angle, accepting the submissive elements of female eroticism without neglecting the fuller bouquet that includes women’s sexual power. In a later performance, Living for Love, she assumes the role of the matador instead, slaying a stable of minotaurs, bringing the mythic and ancient motifs to the modern.
 
**

Video still, Take a Bow, Madonna, 1994

Depending on one’s perspective of the corrida spectacle, the idea of the matadora is either obvious, or turns tradition on its head.
 
There are more than ten thousand licensed bullfighters in Spain, and of those, around 800 are full status matadors. Only eight are matadoras- women who fight bulls. 
 
Women were banned from the role altogether until 1974. Some skirted the rules historically, eschewing the ban on foot by fighting on mounted horses.
 
Francisco Goya, the grand master of Spanish art history, frequently portrayed La Tauromaquia. He immortalized the female bullfighter Pajuelera in his 1816 drawing, Manly Courage of the Celebrated Pajuelera at Zaragoza.
 
Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada depicted a matadora in an engraving, dated between 1890 and 1910.
 
Picasso portrayed his young mistress in a 1934 etching, Marie-Thérèse as Female Bullfighter. Predictably, in Picasso’s work, the woman appears in a submissive position, upturned, and docile, vanquished.
 
The rare women toreros hold a different view.
 
American matadora Bette Ford said, “I’ve been gored, my back’s been broken, my hand was almost ripped off.”
 
She told Guernica Magazine, “… When you’re out there in the ring, the bull certainly does seem to stand a chance. The unfairness seems the other way around. I’m in the ring, I weigh 90 pounds, the bull weighs 900. I have a cape and a sword. The bull has two sharp horns. The bull is a 900-pound athlete, an intelligent athlete. It’s capable of guile. A bull will try to outwit you. “
 
Yet she was never vanquished.  She described the fight as a “very spiritual engagement with power, with power and death." In her ten year career, she killed 200 bulls.
 
**

Marie-Thérèse as Female Bullfighter, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1934

Manly Courage of the Celebrated Pajuelera in the Ring, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1816

Matador and Bull, by Elaine de Kooning (USA) 1972

While countless male painters have been inspired by the corrida, few female artists have explored the bullfight theme. Mary Cassatt painted a matador. Another notable exception is the abstract expressionist and figurative expressionist artist Elaine de Kooning. 
 
“I went to Juárez to see the bullfights, which immediately struck me as a heightened image of Southwestern landscape – the panorama of the arena, the heraldic colours…” (quoted in E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 1979, p. 255).
 
Her series of abstract paintings shows the energy of the struggle, with bold gestures that captures the essence of chaos, aggression, dynamic physical action, and spectacle.
 
**

At the Pub Torre del Oro, Madrid, photo by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2019

In Madrid, exhausted and exhilarated from the Prado, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the streets, we enter a tiny, buzzing pub and drop our weary selves onto a couple of barstools. 
 
What a place! An array of dusty, steely-eyed taxidermy bulls glare down at us. The walls are plastered in gore, in grisly photographs and newspaper clippings about bullfights. There are shrines to fallen matadors. TV screens compete with the din, blasting out replays of fights. We order cervezas to beat the heat, and, scanning the menu, decide to brave the rabo de toro y vino tinto: a Spanish delicacy of oxtail in red wine sauce.
 
The Torre del Oro was mostly established for tourists, but it is based on a longstanding tradition of bull bars in Madrid, where corrida aficionados would gather after a fight to discuss the nuances of the event. Such drinking holes are familiar around the world as sports bars, with one distinguishing difference: these ones serve up the meat of the fallen bulls.
 
Locals tell us the stew we adventurously ordered is more likely made with cow’s tail. There are specialty restaurants, however, where bull meat is served following the fights.
 
We are told that historically, the dead bulls were butchered and distributed to the poor as a form of social welfare. Extra meat was consumed in village festivals by the whole community.
 
This answers an important question for me. I could never say that I’m “for” bullfighting. Still, it is not so much a position on the subject that I seek, but understanding. But I had wondered what happens to the carcasses of defeated animals. I am relieved to learn that they are used for food and not thrown away.
 
In my youth, I was a vegetarian for many years, but eventually resumed consumption. This return to nature had positive effects on my health. Refusing meat is an honourable religious act to minimize the suffering of God’s creatures. If cats and sharks do not concern themselves with the brutality of their diet, humans wrestle with questions of cruelty and sometimes seek out alternative options. For the rest of us, coming to terms with eating death can be difficult. Many of us live in denial, preferring not to think about it at all.

I  try to remember  animals’ gift to us as something sacred. The gravitas of this sacrifice requires ongoing gratitude on my part.  
 
In this view, the bullfight takes on even more meaning. Sexuality, power, and the mythic battle between man and nature, between humans and the gods, are certainly aspects of the spectacle. Another is that most of us participate in this as more than spectators or philosophers. 
 
Perhaps the bullfight is also a ritual confrontation of the reality of sustenance. Most of us leave the actual killing of our dinner up to someone else, letting them do the dirty work for us. There’s an old adage that if you can’t kill it, you shouldn’t eat it, an idea that emphasizes understanding and accountability and moderation. 
 
Is the bullfight is an age-old reminder of the rites we participate in every day while we look away, oblivious, from the truth of death?
 
In this view, the corrida is an artful and honest ritual, far more so than our obtuse, sanitized consumption of meat packaged in Saran wrap and Styrofoam.
 
Lorette C. Luzajic