"Los Caprichos" by Francisco Goya

Los Caprichos are a set of 80 aquatint prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Jose de Goya in 1797 and 1798, and published as an album in 1799. The prints were an artistic experiment: a medium for Goya's condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society in which he lived. The criticisms are far-ranging and acidic; he speaks against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes, and the decline of rationality. Some of the prints have anticlerical themes. Goya described the series as depicting "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual".

The work was an enlightened, tour-de-force critique of 18th-century Spain, and humanity in general. The informal style, as well as the depiction of contemporary society found in Caprichos, makes them – and Goya himself – a precursor to the modernist movement almost a century later. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters in particular has attained an iconic status.

Goya added brief explanations of each image to a manuscript now in the Prado; these help greatly to explain his often cryptic intentions, as do the titles printed below each image.

Goya's series, and the last group of prints in his series The Disasters of War, which he called "caprichos enfáticos" ("emphatic caprices") are far from the spirit of light-hearted fantasy the term caprice usually suggests in art. Visit Wikipedia to see all 80 prints

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos') is the most famous plate of the series. Etched between 1797–1799, it is plate 43 of the 80 etchings and was initially intended to be the frontispiece. It consists of a self-portrait of the artist with his head on a table, as owls and bats surround him, assailing him as he buries his head into his arms. Seemingly poised to attack the artist are owls (symbols of folly) and bats (symbols of ignorance).The viewer might read this as a portrayal of what emerges when reason is suppressed and, therefore, as an espousal of Enlightenment ideals. However, it also can be interpreted as Goya's commitment to the creative process and the Romantic spirit—the unleashing of imagination, emotions, and even nightmares. Arguably the most famous plate of the series, it has gone on to become an iconic image, with its title often being quoted from Goya.

"The Disasters of War" by Francisco Goya

The Disasters of War (Spanish: Los Desastres de la Guerra) are a series of 82 prints created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya (1746–1828). Although Goya did not make known his intention when creating the plates, art historians view them as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular War of 1808–14 and the setbacks to the liberal cause following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814.

During the conflicts between Napoleon's French Empire and Spain, Goya retained his position as first court painter to the Spanish crown and continued to produce portraits of the Spanish and French rulers. Although deeply affected by the war, he kept private his thoughts on the art he produced in response to the conflict and its aftermath. He was in poor health and almost deaf when, at 62, he began work on the prints. They were not published until 1863, 35 years after his death. It is likely that only then was it considered politically safe to distribute a sequence of artworks criticising both the French and restored Bourbons. In total over a thousand sets have been printed, though later ones are of lower quality, and most print room collections have at least some of the set.

The name by which the series is known today is not Goya's own. His handwritten title on an album of proofs given to a friend reads: Fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices (Spanish: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). Aside from the titles or captions given to each print, these are Goya's only known words on the series. With these works, he breaks from a number of painterly traditions. He rejects the bombastic heroics of most previous Spanish war art to show the effect of conflict on individuals. In addition he abandons colour in favour of a more direct truth he found in shadow and shade.

The series was produced using a variety of intaglio printmaking techniques, mainly etching for the line work and aquatint for the tonal areas, but also engraving and drypoint. As with many other Goya prints, they are sometimes referred to as aquatints, but more often as etchings. The series is usually considered in three groups which broadly mirror the order of their creation.

The first 47 focus on incidents from the war and show the consequences of the conflict on individual soldiers and civilians.

The middle series (plates 48 to 64) record the effects of the famine that hit Madrid in 1811–12, before the city was liberated from the French.

The final 17 reflect the bitter disappointment of liberals when the restored Bourbon monarchy, encouraged by the Catholic hierarchy, rejected the Spanish Constitution of 1812 and opposed both state and religious reform.

Since their first publication, Goya's scenes of atrocities, starvation, degradation and humiliation have been described as the "prodigious flowering of rage" as well as the "work of a memory that knew no forgiveness." The serial nature in which the plates unfold has led some to see the images as similar in nature to photography.

Read more about this work in WIKIPEDIA and see all 82 pictures with Goya's quotings in WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Madness in art

William Dickinson (Print made by),

Robert Edge Pine (After) (1775)

A female figure representing madness, with straw and a scarf in tangled hair, a rope holding a pelt around her leaving the breast bare, clutching at the chains which hold her with her right arm, twisting to the left and staring wildly towards the upper left.

Charles Bell "Madness"
The anatomy and philosophy of
expression as connected
with the fine arts (1806)

Ambroise Tardieu
Des Maladies Mentales (1838)

"Attaque Demoniaque" (1881)
by Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer

Dr. Desiré Magloire Bourneville (1875)
The first stage of demoniacal possession:
contortion followed by insensibility.

Francisco Goya
Yard with Lunatics (1794)

This painting is his record of conditions in an institution at Zaragoza.Goya wrote that the painting shows "a yard with lunatics, and two of them fighting completely naked while their warder beats them, and others in sacks. It has been described as a "somber vision of human bodies without human reason" and as one of Goya's "deeply disturbing visions of sadism and suffering." The painting had been absent from public view since a private sale in 1922. The work was painted at a time when such institutions were, according to art critic Robert Hughes, no more than "holes in the social surface, small dumps into which the psychotic could be thrown without the smallest attempt to discover, classify, or treat the nature of their illness."To art historian Arthur Danto, Yard with Lunatics marks a point in Goya's career where he moves from "a world in which there are no shadows to one in which there is no light"

William Hogarth
The Interior of Bedlam (1763)

The Bethlem Royal Hospital of London although no longer in its original location and buildings, it is recognised as the world's first and oldest institution to specialise in the mentally ill. It has been variously known as St. Mary Bethlehem, Bethlem Hospital, Bethlehem Hospital and Bedlam. It admitted mentally deranged people from 1357, but it became a dedicated psychiatric hospital quite later. The word bedlam, meaning uproar and confusion, is derived from its name. For much of its history it was notorious for cruelty and inhumane treatment – the epitome of what the term "madhouse" connotes to the modern reader.

Delacrois "A Mad Woman" (1822)

Picasso "Mad woman with cat" (1901)

Chaim Soutine "mad woman" (1920)

Chaim Soutine "mad woman" (1919)

Mental aberration and irrational states of mind could not fail to interest artists against Enlightenment rationality. Théodore Géricault, like many of his contemporaries, examined the influence of mental states on the human face and believed, as others did that a face more accurately revealed character, especially in madness and at the moment of death. He made many studies of the inmates in hospitals and institutions for the criminally insane, and he studied the heads of guillotine victims. He was among the first to depict an abnormal mental state as an illness, rather than as a subject for laughter. Some of his painting on madness we can see below:

Cleptomaniac or Mad Assasin (1822)

Woman alienated by envy monomania
(1820-1824)

Monomaniac of Military Commander
(1819-1822)

Compulsive Gambler (1820)

Cannibalism in art: Cronus devouring his children

Two creepy paintings by famous painters about Cronus' (Saturn) myth who ate his children.

Francisco Goya (1823)

Ο πίνακας αυτός του Γκόγια είναι από τους πιο τρομερούς και μακάβριους σε όψη, δείχνοντας έναν Κρόνο σε κατάσταση κανιβαλιστικής παράκρουσης και τρέλας να καταβροχθίζει ένα ανθρώπινο σώμα. Ανήκει στους λεγόμενους Black paintings της πιο σκοτεινής περιόδου της ζωής του με έργα τα οποία τα έφτιαχνε μόνο για τον εαυτό του ενώ ήταν κλεισμένος στο σπίτι του, κάτω από μεγάλο ψυχικό στρες.

Ο πίνακας του Ρούμπενς, πιο συμβατικός και πιο κοντά στην αφήγηση του μύθου δείχνει έναν κακόβουλο γέρο να τρώει ένα βρέφος. Πολλοί όμως πιστεύουν ότι αυτός είναι ακόμα πιο τρομερός, γιατί ο πίνακας του Γκόγια απεικονίζει έναν τρελό σε στιγμή παράκρουσης, ενώ του Ρούμπενς έναν κακόβουλο και σαδιστή που έχει πλήρη συναίσθηση της πράξης του.

Εχουν διατυπωθεί και απόψεις που θέλουν τον πίνακα του Γκόγια να μην αναπαριστά τον Κρόνο, μια και το ανθρώπινο σώμα όχι μόνο δεν είναι βρέφους, αλλά οι καμπύλες του πιθανότατα να απεικονίζουν γυναικείο σώμα.

Πάντως και οι δυο πίνακες είναι εξίσου τρομεροί, ο καθένας με τον τρόπο του: από τη μια όπως αναφέρω πιο πάνω για το "ρεαλιστικό" έργο του Ρούμπενς, αλλά για το οποίο "αποστασιοποιημένοι" εμείς εκφράζουμε την απέχθειά μας απέναντι στον κακόβουλο γέρο, από την άλλη όμως, στο "εξπρεσιονιστικό έως σουρεαλιστικό" έργο του Γκόγια νοιώθουμε ένα τρόμο μέσα μας, σαν να γίνεται ο καθρέφτης κάποιας καταπιεσμένης τέτοιας παραφροσύνης στην άβυσσο της ψυχής μας που δεν θέλουμε να ξέρουμε τίποτε για αυτήν!!!

Perhaps the best known of Francisco Goya's Black Paintings is Saturn Devouring His Son, a disturbing portrait of Saturn . The frightening image portrays Saturn eating one of his children. Goya depicts this act of cannibalism with startling savagery. The background is black, while the limbs and head of Saturn seem to pop out of the shadows. Saturn's eyes are huge and bulging as if he were mad. His fingers dig into the back of his son, whose head and right arm are already consumed. Saturn is about to take another bite of his child's left arm. The only use of color besides flesh-tones is the splash of red blood covering the mutilated outline of the upper part of the partially-eaten, motionless body, which is chillingly depicted in deathly white. Goya may have been inspired by Peter Paul Rubens' 1636 picture of the same name.(wikipedia)

Peter Paul Rubens (1636)

Rubens' painting is a brighter, more conventional treatment of the myth: his Saturn exhibits less of the cannibalistic ferocity portrayed in Goya's rendition. However, some critics have suggested that Rubens' portrayal is the more horrific: the god is portrayed as a calculating remorseless killer, who – fearing for his own position of power – murders his innocent child. Goya's vision, on the other hand, shows a man driven mad by the act of killing his own son. In addition, the body of the son in Goya's picture is that of an adult, not the helpless baby depicted by Rubens.

Goya had produced a chalk drawing of the same subject in 1796-7 that was closer in tone to Rubens' work: it showed a Saturn similar in appearance to that of Rubens', daintily biting on the leg of one of his sons while he holds another like a leg of chicken, with none of the gore or madness of the later work. Goya scholar Fred Licht has raised doubts regarding the traditional title however, noting that the classical iconographical attributes associated with Saturn are absent from the painting, and the body of the smaller figure does not resemble that of an infant. The rounded buttocks and wide hips of the headless corpse has also called into question the identification of this figure as a male. (wikipedia)

Francisco Goya 's Black Paintings "Witches Sabbath"

"The Great He-Goat" or "Witches' Sabbath" - The darker version

Two Goya's dark paletted works from the Black Paintings collection are titled "The Great He-Goat or Witches' Sabbath (El aquelarre"). Earlier, Goya created a version of this work in a more cheerful and optimistic way (see below); however, this image is ominous and gloomy. This earth-toned illustration shows Goya's demonstration of the ancient belief that the Sabbath was a meeting of witches supervised by the devil, who took the form of a goat. The goat is painted completely black and appears as a silhouette in front of a crowd of witches and warlocks. These "sub-humans" have sunken eyes and near horrifying features. The figures huddle together, leaning towards the devil. Only one girl seems resistant to the crowd, and she sits at the far right, dressed in black holding a muff. Though she does not appear involved in the ritual, she does seem to be captivated by the group's relationship to the devil.

"The Great He-Goat" or "Witches' Sabbath" - The more cheerful version

The Black Paintings are a group of paintings by Francisco Goya created in the later years of his life (1819–1823) that portray intense, haunting themes. In 1819 at the age of 72, Goya moved into a two-story house outside of Madrid called "Quinta del Sordo," or "Deaf Man's Villa". Although the house had been named after the previous owner who was deaf, Goya was himself deaf at the time as a result of an illness he suffered at the age of 46. After the Napoleonic Wars and the turmoil of the Spanish government, Goya developed an embittered attitude towards humanity. He had an acute awareness of panic, terror, fear, and hysteria. Also surviving two near-fatal illnesses, Goya grew increasingly anxious and impatient in fear of relapse. These factors combined are thought to have led to his production of 14 works known as the Black Paintings.

Using oil paints and working directly onto the walls of his dining and sitting rooms, Goya created intense, haunting works with dark themes. The paintings were not commissioned, and they were not meant to leave his home; it is likely that the artist never intended the works for public exhibition: "...these paintings are as close to being hermetically private as any that have ever been produced in the history of Western art." He did not title the paintings, but art historians have since provided titles. (wikipedia)