Old, deaf and happy

FRANCISCO GOYA, who immortalised Spain's Bourbon royalty in paint, lived to a great age. In 1792, when he was 47, he became very ill. No one is sure what the cause was: it might have been a form of poisoning brought on by the lead-based white paint that he used, or a variation of Ménière's disease, or something else. There were rushing sounds in his ears, he said, and he often felt dizzy, faint and deaf. Goya could not amplify sound with the help of an ear trumpet. He could not, like Beethoven, hold one end of a stick clenched between his teeth and rest the end on top of the piano so that when the notes were played they were channelled directly into his skull. The attack lasted several weeks, and although he recovered, for the rest of his life he remained, as Julia Blackburn writes, “as deaf as a dead man who will not be woken from his cold sleep, no matter how loudly you shout.”