On 6 February 1799 the Diario de Madrid carried an announcement which filled its front page. It advertised for sale, at the current price of 4 reales an engraving, a collection of eighty prints in etching and aquatint by Goya ‘censuring human errors and vices’. The Duke of Osuna had already bought four sets in January. On 19 February a shorter advertisement appeared in the Gazeta. According to Goya the Caprichos were on sale for only two days; twenty-seven sets were bought. They were suddenly withdrawn. In 1803 Goya made over the plates to the royal Calcografia in return for a pension for his son. It is possible that an edition was prepared in 1806 during Godoy’s final lurch into ‘liberalism’ before the cataclysm; isolated impressions occasionally came out; but in fact a second edition did not appear until the middle of the nineteenth century.
Guillemardet, the regicide French ambassador whom Goya painted in 1798, took a set back to France, where they were to be studied by his godson, the painter Eugene Delacroix; it was in France in the next generation that the Caprichos made their first impact. When they finally reached England they were duly burned in the street by Ruskin.
Reaction in Spain was more immediate. The final advertisement in 1799 appeared on 19 February. On 21 February (the ‘two days’ of Goya?) the liberal minister Saavedra was abruptly dismissed. According to later statements by Goya, the prints were withdrawn under threat from the Inquisition. In 1803 clerical and reactionary pressure was intense and the plates were handed over to the royal printer in self-defence, apparently at the prompting of Godoy.
The prints were fierce enough to provoke suppression.
A score or so were searing attacks on monks, friars, the Church and ‘superstition’, direct or in the guise of satires on witches and goblins, ‘duende’; a dozen were transparent jibes
at hereditary aristocracy and at least thirty carried a potent charge of satire on sexual mores.
They are a brilliant technical achievement. Goya deploys a mastery of tone and texture and an inventive genius.
Superb control of light and shade pinpoints subjects against a graduated and sombre background; the style is expressionist. Passion and unreason effectively distort form and face, shape a bone-hard realism to visual satire and twist it to the edge of caricature. The witchcraft series pullulate with hags, terrifying monsters, black sabbaths, ghastly faces and scatological paraphernalia; they are shattering in their grotesque naturalism. Monsters of sick fantasy come to ‘human’ life with all the fleshiness of a medieval nightmare. The series appears to escalate from satire into a satanism conjured up by a spirit sick in the sleep of reason which was Spanish society.
The sequence is in fact controlled and directed by Reason. ‘The sleep (or dream) of reason brings forth monsters’ runs the only engraved caption, to the scene of the author asleep at his table while creatures of night scrabble about his head. The intention is to rake the irrational, the superstitious, the anti-human in social life, but Goya himself talks of these monsters coming into his drawings as if he had no control over them. The device of witchcraft tends to assume a human reality and to create an anti-world of spirit which rivets a reeling imagination on the withering truth that the inhuman is all too disgustingly human. It is precisely this tension between Reason and Unreason, both essentially human, which gives the engravings their power and compulsion.
That power had in fact been muted. Goya had first considered publication in 1797 and grouped drawings in sequences under the title of Dreams, suehos. For the Caprichos, these sequences were broken up. Some run in pairs or trios, but few in series. The original frontispiece for the Dreams, the Sleep of Reason engraving, forms No. 43 of the Caprichos. Witchcraft and supernatural subjects are found everywhere in the set, but tend to thicken after No. 43.
Only one run seems complete, a series of Asnerias , engravings using asses and donkeys to satirize profession and status,
Nos. 27 to 42. A number of attacks on the clergy, thinly veiled as jibes at ‘goblins’, were evidently a coherent Series, their captions mounting a devastating onslaught, culminating in the final Capricho of evil-visaged, stretching monks in a grey dawn captioned Time’s Up (Ya es hora) [21]. Had these remained in intensifying sequence, the impact would have been yet more destructive.
The captions are essential. Far from clarifying the picture, many of them serve to deepen ambiguity and sharpen paradox. They mobilize quotations from satirical writings by ilustrados , the opening phrases of proverbs, puns with double entendre , catch-phrases, references to well-known events and popular beliefs, and all act as a stone thrown into a pond, sending ripples of satire out from the drawing in widening circles of meaning and perception.
For example, a vivid presentation of a victim of the Inquisition in the conical hat of the guilty with the ‘crime’ blazoned across the chest, seated on a platform while an
13. That dust . . . (from that dust comes this dirt). Caprichos, 23, 1799
official intones the sentence to a huddled, mindless, grimacing mob, is captioned Aquellos polvos , That Dust. Apart from its intrinsic force, this caption recalls a celebrated public spectacle of 1784, when such humiliation before imprisonment was inflicted upon some wretches convicted of selling corpse-dust as a magic potion. But the words are also the first strophe of a popular proverb which, completed, ran - From that dust comes this dirt - pillorying the Inquisition as the Other Face of brute superstition. 1 In lighter vein, a rather erotic drawing of two girls, scantily clad, flaunting their bottoms before grinning males and carrying chairs on
14. Now they’re sitting pretty. Caprichos, 26, 1799
their heads, is captioned Ya tienen asiento : a play on asiento, with its meaning of ‘seat’ as well as ‘judgement’ and a further play on the idiomatic meaning of tener asiento - to be sitting pretty [13,14].
Directed at particular customs in origin, the Caprichos , through Goya’s magic, are often transformed into permanent statements, transcending time and place. Several of them in the witchcraft mode are now incomprehensible; clearly many of these were directed at particular individuals or events familiar to the readers. The Osunas seem to have taken the Caprichos primarily as farcical squibs of this character.
15. The chinchillas. Caprichos, 50, 1799
Nevertheless, it is possible to trace many back to their proximate source. Edith Helman, in a sustained and scholarly enterprise, has been able to place or to suggest the original inspiration of many. 2
Take the celebrated print, Los Chinchillas (No. 50).
Spotlit are two effete male figures, pinioned in costumes blazoned with coats of arms. One lies on the ground, clutching a rosary; the other sags, half upright, carrying a sword. Every line in their flaccid bodies indicates the torpid, the inert, the useless. Heavy padlocks are clamped over their ears; their eyes are shut and their mouths gape. A dark, thrusting figure, charged with power and menace but in fact servile, with asses’ ears and eyes blindfold, ladles sustenance from a cauldron through a highlit spoon into the mindless mouths [15].
The piece is obviously an attack on hereditary aristocracy, but the caption, los chinchillas , is enigmatic, especially since the American rodent of that name is feminine in Spanish. The name in fact derived from a character in a popular play by Canizares which mocked, in fairly genial terms, the obsession with nobility, blood and status. In a preparatory drawing Goya sketched in the two central figures, but included characters from the play in a theatrical setting.
This was his first response, little more than theatrical illustration. In a second preparatory drawing, creative genius is at work in splendid simplification, and the final Capricho is a powerful and evocative statement which transcends time and place. 3
Nevertheless the Caprichos were rooted in a very particular Spanish time and place. In fact they are an ideology made graphic.
The Asnerias of course were a fairly common and obvious style of satire. Gabriel Alvarez de Toledo had brought out his Burromaquia , and Forner in his El asno erudito had used the ass figure to lash literary rivals. Some very striking parallels may be traced between Goya’s burro Caprichos and a series of (much cruder) engravings which served as illustrations to a satirical work published in exile in Bayonne in 1792, Memorias de la insigne Academia Asnal by a so-called Doctor de Ballesteros; this was circulating in Madrid at the time of Goya’s convalescence. The distance travelled may be judged from a comparison between the A sinus Musicus of this compilation, a simplist fiddle-playing donkey, and Capricho No. 38, Bravisimo , which has a monkey playing a guitar with no strings to an applauding ass. A similar relationship seems
to exist between Memorias crudities and such splendid lampoons as that against doctors in Capricho No. 40 [16] and the ass tracing a family tree of asses in Capricho No. 39.
In a satire on education in Capricho No. 37, one ass teaching another, with the motto - might not the pupil know more ? - there seems to be an echo of a famous scene from Padre Isla’s novel Fray Gerundio.
Isla’s Gerundio had shredded the absurdities and farandoles of popular preaching in Spain to such effect that the Inquisition tried to ban the text in 1760 and 1776; a new edition of 1787, together with all writings for and against it,
16. What will he die of? Caprichos, 40, 1799
was listed on the Index in 1790. This mockery touched a raw nerve. The term ‘gerundios’ passed into common parlance and Goya’s Capricho No. 53 - What a Golden Beak! - a farcical clerical seminar held spell-bound by a parrot - was squarely in an Enlightenment tradition and may well have been directed personally against Fray Diego de Cadiz, a preacher madly popular at the time and anathema to ilustrados [17]. Such satire bucked a very strong tide among the Spanish pueblo; n on-rational, indeed anti-rational preaching was a formative feature of popular culture. Men like Fray Diego were not only active in the first ‘crusade’ against
17. What a golden beak! Caprichos, 53, 1799
revolutionary France in 1793; they were often central to the heroic and traumatic national resistance after 1808.
More populist perhaps were the attacks on the cortejo, the inseparable male companion of society wives and their often complaisant husbands, since the institution seems to have been actively disliked by a pueblo more given to the modes of majismo. Attacks on the cortejo ran through a range of styles; in 1788 they produced a veritable manual, with illustrations, in the Optica del Cortejo. This, in turn, opened up the entire world of arranged marriages and led into the labyrinths of sexual-social intrigue and prostitution.
18. Can no one untie us? Caprichos, 75, 1799
Notiiing looms larger in the Caprichos. The pretty, blank-faced girl, trained and directed by the duenna-cum- chaperone-cum-procuress, the celestina of Spanish tradition (who in Goya’s hands is invariably a grotesque, repulsive and cunning old hag), the prancing petimetres (petits-maitres), the corrupt and mercenary marriages, the endless jockeying and fencing for social-sexual advancement on the Paseo del Prado, run parallel to the more direct jeers at prostitution, the plucking of bird-men by merciless whores and the complementary chewing of bird-whores by greedy officialdom. These engravings run from direct statement, sometimes pathetic and sentimental - far more often heartless and chill - to deeply cynical and utterly bleak comment. They can produce very striking work, as in No. 75 - Can no one untie us? - a man and woman lashed together and imprisoned by a monstrous bespectacled owl [18]. They can produce bitter personal comment on the Duchess of Alba [43]. They overflow into and interpenetrate with the hideous universe of witchcraft and the black supernatural. In a sense the sexual satires are central to the Caprichos; their spirit drenches the collection. Woman frequently figures as the vehicle of that corruption and unreason which is making a grotesque tragi-farce out of a Spanish society presided over by Queen Maria Luisa and her cortejo Godoy.
The tone of the engravings echoes that of much Enlightened literary comment on the same themes. Nicolas Fernandez de Moratin, father of the dramatist who was a close friend of Goya, produced an Arte de las putas which was banned by the Holy Office in 1777 but circulated in manuscript. It built on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria but also on the medieval classics of Spanish bawdy, La Celestina and Libro de buen amor which had recently been revived in a work whose publication Jovellanos had recommended to the Academy. It is now known that Goya’s bull-fighting prints began as an illustrative series for Moratin senior’s history of the ritual, and its companion piece was certainly known to the painter. 4
Through even this sexual satire, however, there are direct echoes of Jovellanos himself, leading light of the ilustrados , whose Informe of 1795 was the foundation text of Spanish liberalism. A friend and patron of Goya’s, he had just been driven from office by clerical reactionaries. 5
Capricho No. 2, given the place of honour after Goya’s self-portrait - They say yes and give their hands to the first comer - takes its title from the first two lines of a satirical poem A Arnesto published by Jovellanos in the Censor.
Helman is able to point to a probable source in Jovellanos’s writing for up to a dozen of even the ‘merely’ sexual prints. Even in these, Goya tends to return in a hypnotized disgust to the suspect monks and friars, not least in the horrifying Tragala , perro - Swallow it, dog (No. 58) - in which grotesque monks advance with a monster syringe on a cowering man [19]. A play on words (to syringe could also mean to plague or vex) it may refer to a popular tale of the rivalry of a monk and soldier over the same woman, in which
19. Swallow it, dog. Caprichos, 58, 1799
the clerics monstrously abuse their spiritual power, but it clearly has much wider implications. 6 In the nineteenth century the words tragala, perro figure as the refrain of a radical political song as the Constitution of Cadiz is forced down recalcitrant reactionary gullets. The most savage attacks on black clerics are those which manhandle them as ‘goblins’, building up from caricatures of them as gluttons for food, drink, power and sex, as parasitic drones who consume better men’s substance into stark portrayals of them as creatures of darkness and night whom the approaching dawn will disperse [20,21,26]. Closely connected are the attacks on that popular
20. No one has seen us. Caprichos, 79, 1799
superstition which buttresses their power, notably in the shattering No. 52 - What a tailor can do! - a tree dressed up in monk’s habit which forms a threatening cross before which people cower while witches hover overhead (a theme which appears in Southey’s letters on Spain) [22]. These attacks, which bite very close to the bone indeed, possibly got their initial impetus from a satire on a Bilbao convent produced in 1791 by the fabulist Samaniego, a close protege of Jovellanos.
In the more general social and political satire, the influence of Jovellanos is everywhere, notably in two attacks on the dead weight of church, state and landowners on the backs of
21. Time’s up. Caprichos, 80, 1799
the Spanish peasantry [8,9], in the onslaughts on the Inquisition (the second Auto da Fe print, No. 27, carries the caption No hubo remedio - nothing can be done about it - which words were used by Jovellanos himself in a description of his dismissal at the hands of clerical reactionaries in 1798) and in the satires on government and establishment (which probably cover most of the impenetrable ‘witchcraft’ engravings as well): all echo Jovellanos’s biting analysis of the corruption and irresponsibility of court and governing classes in the face of mounting discontent. If any one man’s mind can be said to direct Goya’s hand in the Caprichos , that man is Jovellanos.
The most direct parallel to the Caprichos , at least in terms of content and corrosive quality, is the journal El Censor. 1 Under the guidance of Luis Canuelo, it fought its way through a brief, brilliant life in the 1780s. In a sense it represents a certain climax of the Enlightenment in Spain.
That Enlightenment never was and never could be the radical affair it was in France, and, in a different style, in Britain. But in a Spain conditioned by its history to the most intransigent forms of religion, hierarchy and discipline, in a Spain where the long underground tradition of populist resistance to establishment assumed anarchic and distinctly ‘un-enlightened’ form, the Censor and its generation of the dissident were a radical Enlightenment.
It could exist only because a form of enlightenment, practical, measured, bureaucratic and politic, had become official doctrine under Charles III. In the shelter of court and establishment enlightenment, in the teeth of the majismo adopted by recalcitrant notables and of the persistent counterattacks of clericals and the Holy Office, journals like the Censor could carry the attack on ‘Black Spain’ with a vigour and passion hitherto unexpressed. It was precisely this world which was disrupted after 1789 by the unexpected horrors of the Revolution of enlightened France, by the power of the conservative reaction within Spain, by the degeneration of the Spanish monarchy under Godoy. It was precisely this world which was confronted by an agonizing dilemma of divided loyalty in the usurpation of Joseph Bonaparte in 1808 countered by a populist uprising often deeply ‘black’ in inspiration. It was precisely this world, afflicted with political schizophrenia, which was dispersed in Spain’s national crisis.
It was to this world that the Caprichos belonged. The Censor published Discursos , often scorching, often written by leading
22. What a tailor can do! Caprichos, 52, 1799
ilustrados under pseudonyms, including Jovellanos and the poet Melendez Valdes, against the distortions of unreason in society, false learning, false marriage, duels, torture, unequal justice. Three themes were central: the defective education of children, a major Enlightenment preoccupation; the parasitism of a swollen hereditary aristocracy; above all the crippling weight of ignorance and superstition which bent the minds of the pueblo in subjection to a charlatan clergy. The Censor was a fervently proselytizing sheet, clear and sharp in its confrontation with reality, direct in its approach, always looking for new force to punch home its message. It was directed at a new reading public, revelled in irony, passion and indignation and was often bitter and violent. By 1785 royal edicts were being issued against satirical papers, themselves often the weapon of faction warfare about the court; the Censor did not survive the reign of Charles III.
In content and intention the Caprichos were the manifesto of ilustrados of Censor breed. In tone, however, they differ significantly. In the Caprichos there is none of that ultimate optimism which underlies the Censor’s fury, no sense of riding the wave of the future. On the contrary, the prints radiate an unredeemed pessimism. Goya seems to despise everyone and everything; there is a cynical detachment, a sense of despair.
In part, this is an optical illusion; the function of the prints, after all, is to satirize; several are obviously ‘comic’ in original intention. The bleakness, however, is much more than a function of a strictly rational critique; it invades the very heart and being of the work. It is precisely the dialectic between light and darkness, mirrored in the very technique of the prints, which is their creative power.
Immediate causes are not difficult to find; Goya’s desperate illness of 1792, his deafness, the harsher vision of reality he was developing in his paintings, the miserable ending of his affair with the Duchess of Alba. In public life there were the multiple shocks of a panic reaction to the French Revolution, the horrors of the Revolution itself, the degradation of the court, the resurgent power of clerical and conservative Spain, the oscillations of politics under the shadow of Godoy. Bitterness and disillusion were common; it was appropriately from the street called Desengano that the Caprichos were sold - recalling the desengano , despair, disillusion and loss of self-confidence of the seventeenth-century Decadence.
This mood was identified with a distinct shift in sensibility which may be detected at this time elsewhere in Europe, the shift that has been labelled ‘pre-romantic’. Helman draws an
instructive parallel with the work of the writer Cadalso. Ilustrado and, like Jovellanos, a student at Salamanca, Cadalso wrote typically enlightened satires in a modish ‘French’ style in his Cartas Aiarruecas , echoes of Montesquieu and all the other critical writers of ‘Letters’; his Eruditos a la violeta was a very influential satire on pseudo-intellectuals. But parallel to his rationalist style there ran a more individual, more free, less rational exploration of the imagination, steeped in disillusion and sadness. His Noches lugubres were directly influenced by Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and in the 1790s there was something of a Spanish vogue for Young, translated (characteristically from a French version) by Juan de Escoquiz. The young poet Melendez Valdes was introduced to Young’s work by Cadalso and wrote to Jovellanos regretting his own failure to achieve ‘the magnificent and terrible style ... of the inimitable Young’. Moratin the younger, too, wrote sentimentally to Cean Bermudez about their admiration for Young from the site of his daughter’s grave. 8
Cadalso himself explored the possibility of ‘capricho’ in its twin senses of caprice and a free exercise of the creative imagination, of those ‘monsters’ which classical orthodoxy, Luzan and Ponz with their endless citing of Horace, so rigorously excluded. Goya in his engravings was employing ‘capricho’ and ‘monsters’ in precisely this sense. He belonged to a group centred on the playwright Moratin who called themselves Acalofilos , lovers of ugliness, who steeped themselves in all the irrationalities, monstrosities and absurdities of the day, primarily to mock and puncture, but also to take cognizance of them, to incorporate them in their rationalism. In revolt against the aridity of neo-classicism, painfully aware of the insecurity of Enlightenment and appalled at the rising tide of Spanish costumbrismo, these men wrote and drew Spanish society as a theatre of the absurd.
For of all the ilustrados , it was the dramatist Moratin who was closest to Goya in the Caprichos. Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, son of Nicolas of the bulls and whores, was fourteen years younger than Goya. 9 He was a complete afrancesado and perhaps the most successful of them.
For his plays, while thoroughly French in inspiration, with Moliere a particular influence, were also thoroughly Spanish in spirit. The plots were simple, the dialogue sharp and brilliant, the comedy often exuberant. His last play, El si de las nihas, became perhaps the most popular of Spanish plays. They are all studies of character; they are all ultimately
didactic in good Enlightenment style, but informed with an insight and a comic power which makes them live.
He spent much time abroad. Jovellanos got him a post in the Paris embassy under the radical Cabarrus in the 1780s; the patronage of Godoy and the success of his second play won him five further years abroad in 1792. During his year in London, he translated Hamlet and was struck by the English stage, which seemed to him similar to the Spanish, and by the power and popularity of English caricatures, which he compared to Spanish popular farces. At the crunch of 1808, like so many of his friends, appalled at the virulence of the popular rising and committed to French values as civilized values, he joined Bonaparte, and after 1814 went into exile. He died within a few months of Goya in Bordeaux.
Particularly from 1797 on his return to Spain, he was a close friend of the painter, who made two superb portraits of him. He shared Goya’s last years in France. His influence on Goya at the time of the Caprichos was personal, direct and decisive. They were both great theatre-goers. Goya had a taste for the tonadillas and sainetes; Moratin was hypnotized by the sheer horror of it all. His play La comedia nueva of 1792 was an attack on the Spanish stage, that monster which consumed a play a week, which was devoted to melodrama and the grotesque, the totally irrational, which enlisted the services of superb artists like the actress Rita Luna and which ranged its passionate plebeian partisans in rival gangs of Polacos and Chorizos (literally Poles and Sausages). This, no less than the sermons of charlatan monks, thought Moratin, was the populist stronghold of Black Spain, which had to be reduced. Y aun no se van ! - wrote Goya as caption to a Capricho (No. 59) of grotesque yet ‘human’ creatures warding off a monolith threatening to crush them - And still they won’t go! [12] Black Spain seemed impregnable, rooted not least in the hearts and minds of the pueblo. Goya’s intention in the Caprichos strictly parallels that of Moratin in his Comedia and other writings: it is to purge that spirit. No less than Moratin’s plays and his extended commentary on witchcraft, Goya’s engravings were literally a Theatre of the Absurd.
It was from Moratin, further, that Goya drew the form and frame of his theatre. Edith Helman has demonstrated beyond doubt that the witchcraft theme in the Caprichos , not merely in conception and scope, but in minute detail of iconography and comment, is drawn from one work of Moratin’s, his mocking commentary on the Inquisition’s Auto da Fe against witchcraft in Logrono in 1610.
The Logrono Auto da Fe of 1610 was one of the most celebrated of all witch-hunts, in which the Inquisition deployed its full power and ritual. The account of the proceedings, the Relation , was so packed with picturesque and grotesque detail that it could serve virtually as a guide or handbook to the cult. To ilustrados , it was a veritable tragic farce, an appalling documentation of the depths of unreason and superstition to which their people could sink, in both the disease and its ‘cure’. The interest in the supernatural and the occult which was general in the late eighteenth century acquired a particular intensity in Spain, more especially
23. There’s plenty to suck. Caprichos, 45, 1799
among its small but passionate minority of luces : the tension between an imported Enlightenment and an increasingly assertive and xenophobic costumbrismo , the failure of hope and loss of confidence after 1790, the darkening political scene, focused their minds sharply on the central problem of what, to them, was the hag-ridden psychology of Spaniards.
Moratin became obsessed with the Relacion. A man diffident to the point of self-strangulation in public, he found himself in small private gatherings, those tertulia conversation parties which Spaniards cherish and which tapped in him an
24. Blow (reference to Inquisition informers?). Caprichos, 69, 1799
effervescence of wit, mockery and ridicule. Ridicule was perhaps the last weapon left in their armoury and ridicule was the raison d’etre of the Acalofilos , as they met to rake over the latest buffooneries of stage and pulpit. It was in such circles that the word ‘duende’ - ghost, spirit, goblin, those ‘monsters’ who peopled the Spanish theatre - was used as a nickname for monks and friars. And to these tertulias Moratin would declaim the Relation in fullblown and flyblown rhetoric, lacing it with his own pungent commentary. Ultimately he worked these comments up into editor’s notes and fashioned a book
25. They spruce themselves up. Caprichos, 51, 1799
which was a weapon. Significantly, the book found a publisher at the rare moments of liberal success: it came out in 1811 in a Madrid under French control, in 1812 in that Cadiz where patriot Spaniards were shaping a democratic constitution, in 1820 in the Madrid of Riego’s revolution.
And almost every detail of iconography, of comment, of reference in Goya’s witchcraft engravings can be traced to Moratin’s notes on the Relacion. It was this which gave form and an organizing principle to the Caprichos , as Goya’s preoccupation with sexual relations in the aftermath of the Alba affair gave them bite [23,24,25,26].
26. If dawn breaks, we go. Caprichos, 71, 1799
It is in these Caprichos that Goya’s distinctive personality as a creative artist first realizes itself; they are the first effective crystallization of his special talents. Under the compulsions of his mind and the drive of his genius, his theatre of the absurd bursts out of its satirical frame; it becomes virtually a theatre of life, a kind of cockpit for the Spanish spirit. In Goya, the only one of them who was a man of the pueblo with an instinctive response to its tastes, the ingrained ambivalence of the ilustrados 3 attitude towards that pueblo acquires a creative intensity. The incipient and what was to prove the endemic Spanish civil war fought itself out within his own mind. It is this dialectical tension which characterizes his most personal and most effective work from this moment on. In The Disasters of War , which are in a very real sense a second instalment of the Caprichos , it generates elemental and unforgettable force.
Two of the Caprichos in particular focus on this ambivalence towards the pueblo , both of them echoes of Jovellanos, who was distressed sometimes to the point of distraction by the miserable servitudes of the Spanish peasantry [8,9]. Capricho No. 42 shows two of the pueblo , drawn in sympathy and compassion, humping spurred and gross burros on the bleak central meseta. The caption runs Tu que no puedes - the first phrase of the proverb, Thou who canst not, lift me on thy shoulders. The message is clear. But in Capricho No. 63 a similar scene registers a significant change. With an angry and gesticulating crowd in the background, two monstrous figures straddle two burros who stand humanlike on two feet.
The riders are ‘witches’, grotesque: one has the figure of a man with the beaked face and claws of a bird of prey; the other is a gross and stupid beast with asses ears, his hands folded in prayer, his ugly face creased in piety. The forces of church and state ride the burro-pueblo. But what burros these are! Bent like men under burden, they have the devil snouts, bestial and repellent, of medieval gargoyles. The burro-pueblo is as brutalized and inhuman as its riders.
Here in these Caprichos a painter of genius finds a distinctive voice. But the man who found his voice in 1799 was a man of fifty-three, the King’s Painter with twenty years of social and professional success behind him. What brought him to it?
27. The garroted man, c. 1778-80