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It was only a few pages into Robert Hughes' new biography of the artist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes that I was brought up short for personal reasons, as I read the following:

"What person whose life is involved with the visual arts... has not thought about Goya?" Hughes asks. "A writer on music who had not thought about Beethoven, or a literary critic who had never read the novels of Charles Dickens--what would such a person's views be worth?... They would not be worth taking seriously." And he goes on to include Goya with those artists critical for critics.

Now I'm sure I thought about Goya for the span of time devoted to him in my high-school art-history survey, and I think of him whenever one of his works appears before me, but I don't tend to bring those images to mind unbidden. I'm not opposed to Goya, and am in fact more disposed toward him now that I've read this amazing book, but it bears thinking about: What use is Goya to our time?

One of the chief virtues of Hughes' book is that it's not (surprisingly, given the author's reputation for contentiousness) vividly polemical. This may be because there aren't any great mysteries at the heart of Goya's life and work, no Mona Lisa-identity to sleuth; Hughes doesn't touch the relatively new claims that Goya was not the painter of the famously dark Black Paintings (although in a Guardian article last fall he dismissed the claims as a "nonissue"). In any case, what Hughes does so admirably is to back off the kind of sentimental over-interpretation that dominates art history, the tendency, for example, to make the artist into a satirical renegade instead of a man of his time, a painter gifted at talking out both sides of his mouth--earning a living (that is, not alienating his royal patrons) and at the same time advancing his own difficult ideas. Hughes gives us a fine history lesson in late-18th- and early-19th-century Spain (the slowly encroaching enlightenment, the remnants of the inquisition, Napoleon's invasion), and lays meticulous ground for the artist's very modern ambivalence about big issues, about religion and patriotism, and shows us how this ambivalence surfaces in his work. Great artists are more complicated than polemical; for example, the title of Goya's famous etching of a sleeping man beset by horrible creatures, El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos, can be translated to mean that when reason sleeps, fear and superstition creep in, and also that reason itself is a dream.

That alone would be a fine lesson for cultural commentators who use art as a moral bludgeon, but there is more to consider here. Goya's art delivered among the first visual horrors in the art world; our prim reactions to contemporary so-called "shock art" reach back to the viewer complicity he created. To look carefully at Goya's Disasters of War, a series of 80 etchings documenting the abuses by both Napoleon's army and the Spanish patriots (dismembered limbs hung from trees, sharp sticks thrust into rectums), is to be reacquainted with violence with fresh eyes, and perhaps--just perhaps--to understand the impulse behind the vandalism of a set of these prints by British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, who replaced all the figures' heads with puppies and clowns.

But the issue I can't yet speak to is why there is no equivalent art today, why there is no art that speaks to political horror the way Disasters of War does. There is plenty of political art, but it is almost all bad, and without the margin of uncertainty that Goya managed despite his strong feelings (which is what makes it art rather than propaganda). There is documentary photography (the napalmed girl in Vietnam; the body-strewn battlefields of the Civil War), and of course the authority of documentary images has been undermined over and over again, but Goya's prints are an act of imagination rather than documentation, and there's the genius of it. Why imagination and ambivalence and art and politics can't unite in the contemporary age is one of the great unanswered questions, and here is where Hughes may be right about Goya's value: I suspect that if I paid close enough attention, if I looked carefully enough at what Goya offers, I might know the answer.