This I Saw: Life and Times of Goya
by .Random House, $5.00.
Mme. Vallentin does not set much store by the Goya legend, which includes such picturesque items as that he broke into a nunnery to kidnap a young lady who had resisted his advances and that he once climbed the dome of St. Peter’s. The Goya we encounter in these pages is a less dashing figure but still a good sitter for a biographer. Mme. Vallentin — the biographer of Leonardo da Vinci, Heine, and Mirabeau — has given a full-bodied work in which Goya’s painting is dealt with in very great detail as well as the “life” and “times.”