Goya, Goats, and the Grotesque
Why did the aging and ailing artist, Francisco Goya, paint his nightmarish ‘Black Paintings’ where no-one was likely to see them?
In the twilight years of an illustrious, and tumultuous, career the great Spanish painter Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes — more usually referred to simply as Goya — purchased Quinta del Sordo, a two-storey house on the banks of the Manzanares river in the countryside near Madrid. Over the next few years, he painted a series of sinister murals that would rank among his most famous works, now known as The Black Paintings.
Fittingly, one of the grandest from this series of 14 scenes is The Witches’ Sabbath painted in a ‘cinemascope’ format more than 14 feet across. At first glance, I assumed some of the mouths of the congregation were open in song, being conducted by the great black goat, accompanied by the hellish tune from a squeezebox played by the seated woman to the right. Nope…
That’s a muffler, keeping her hands warm in the midnight chill. As she is the only one sitting in a chair, maybe she’s the matriarch but some scholars propose that she’s a fresh initiate awaiting to be inducted into the coven. The crone, crouched to the right of the goat’s cloven hoofs may be the ‘MC’, mixing up the magical potions they will all…
