Francisco de Goya (1746–1828)

“Undoubtedly, the most real Goya is in these creations, they are his works of thought. While most of his paintings are commissioned and the subject is imposed on him, the Goya engraver acts with full and absolute freedom and deploys his entire internal world there, where his own ideology is exposed.”

Juan Carrete Parrondo Goya. Estampas. Grabado y litografía

By the close of the eighteenth century Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) occupied a paradoxical position within Spanish culture. He was, by 1799, firmly established as First Court Painter to Charles IV, producing official portraits that confirmed his prominence at court. Yet beneath this success lay deep unease. A severe illness in the mid-1790s had left him permanently deaf, an affliction that distanced him from the social circles of Madrid and sharpened his inner world. The enforced isolation coincided with a Spain convulsed by intellectual, political, and religious tensions: the Enlightenment had reached Iberia, but the Inquisition and entrenched traditions continued to exert control.

It was in this atmosphere that Goya conceived Los Caprichos. Published briefly in early 1799, the series of eighty etchings constitutes one of the most audacious artistic interventions of the period. Drawing upon etching, aquatint, drypoint, and burin, Goya produced grotesque witches, fraudulent clerics, and gullible peasants, all rendered with satirical edge. His aim was not entertainment but moral critique: to expose folly, superstition, and corruption wherever they appeared. The famous Plate 43, with its inscription “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” (“The sleep of reason produces monsters”), encapsulates the Enlightenment ideal that reason, once abandoned, gives rise to destructive irrationality.

The work’s reception was fraught. Although admired in reformist circles, the potential for charges of impiety or sedition forced Goya to withdraw the edition from sale almost immediately. He deposited the copper plates with the Calcografía Nacional in exchange for a royal pension, a pragmatic gesture that preserved the series while shielding him from the Inquisition.

The endurance of Los Caprichos rests in its universality. Goya distilled the anxieties of his age into images that remain disturbingly familiar. His witches and fools are not historical curiosities but embodiments of enduring human weaknesses, ensuring that the series speaks with undiminished urgency across centuries.

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