Introduction:

Francisco de Goya lived during a period when Spain was caught between Enlightenment ideals and deep social instability. Born in 1746, he built a successful career as a painter for the Spanish court, but his work often looked beyond the surface of wealth and power. He was surrounded by a world that was beginning to question superstition, religious authority, inherited status, and corruption, while also moving toward the violence and uncertainty that would later define the Peninsular War. Goya’s life and career were shaped by these contradictions. He worked within elite institutions, but he also became one of their sharpest critics. His art often reveals a tension between public appearance and private truth, between what society claims to value and what it actually protects.

Published in 1799, Los Caprichos is a series of eighty etchings and aquatints that transformed social criticism into something strange, dark, and dreamlike. The prints are filled with witches, donkeys, fools, monsters, and distorted human figures, but they are not simply fantasies. Goya used these unsettling images to expose the irrational behavior he saw in the world around him. Through exaggeration and satire, he criticized vanity, ignorance, superstition, abuse of power, and the false respectability of social status. This exhibition focuses on twelve plates from the series: 39, 43, 45, 50, 55, 62, 68, 69, 72, 75, 79, and 80. Together, these works show Goya at his most psychologically disturbing, where the line between human behavior and monstrosity begins to disappear.

What makes these prints so unsettling is that Goya’s monsters do not feel entirely imaginary. They seem to come from human behavior itself, especially from the ways people cling to vanity, status, secrecy, superstition, and false ideas about themselves.

A Note on the Exhibition:

This exhibition is monographic because it focuses on one artist: Francisco de Goya. Instead of placing him beside other artists, it stays within his own visual world and looks closely at how he builds meaning in Los Caprichos. The exhibition does not try to show the entire series of eighty prints. Instead, it focuses on twelve plates that reveal some of Goya’s darkest ideas about folly, fear, and moral corruption. By narrowing the series down, the exhibition allows the viewer to see how these images connect to one another, even when they seem strange or unrelated at first.

At the same time, the exhibition has a thematic undertone. It is not organized only by print number or chronology, but by the larger question of what happens when reason begins to fail. The selected plates move between social satire and supernatural imagery, but these two worlds are never completely separate. A donkey proudly looking at his noble ancestry in plate 39 and witches gathering in the later plates may seem like very different subjects, but they point to a similar problem. In both cases, Goya shows a society that accepts performance, inheritance, ritual, and illusion as if they are truth. The exhibition therefore looks at Los Caprichos as both a study of Goya’s work and an exploration of irrationality.

Goya’s use of aquatint is also important to this argument. The darkness in the prints does not only create mood. It changes the way the viewer understands the images. Figures appear out of shadow or fade back into it, making the scenes feel unstable and uncertain. The darkness feels psychological as much as physical. It is not only the darkness of night, but also the darkness of confusion, secrecy, fear, and self-deception.

Plate 43: “El sueño de razón produce monstruos”:

Plate 43, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, is the center of this exhibition because it gives visual form to the main argument of the entire selection. The image shows a figure, usually understood as an artist or even Goya himself, asleep at a desk while owls, bats, and other creatures gather around him. It is one of the most famous images in the history of printmaking, but its meaning is more complicated than it first appears.

At first, the print seems to say something simple: when reason falls asleep, monsters appear. That reading is important, but it is not enough. Goya was not arguing that imagination itself is evil. In fact, the scholarship around this print makes clear that Goya was interested in the relationship between reason and imagination, not the destruction of imagination. Alexander Nehamas’s reading of the image is especially useful here because he argues that reason’s sleep does not mean imagination has simply taken over. Instead, the problem is imbalance. Imagination without reason becomes dangerous, but reason without imagination is also incomplete.

This matters because Los Caprichos is itself a work of imagination. Goya needed fantasy, distortion, and exaggeration in order to tell the truth. The monsters are invented, but the social criticism is real. Plate 43 therefore works almost like a warning label for the exhibition. It tells the viewer how to look at the other prints. The witches, animals, and grotesque bodies should not be dismissed as random fantasy. They are the forms that human irrationality takes when it is allowed to grow unchecked.

Mary G. Winkler’s discussion of Goya’s creativity later in life also helps explain why this print feels so personal. After Goya’s illness and deafness, his work became more inward-looking and psychologically intense. In this context, plate 43 can be understood not only as a social critique, but also as a self-portrait of the artist confronting the darker parts of the mind. The sleeping figure is vulnerable. He is surrounded by the very images he creates. This makes the print unsettling because it suggests that the artist is both exposing irrationality and haunted by it.

The Sublime and the Mildly Upsetting:

Several of the selected plates show that Goya’s monsters do not always appear as obvious monsters. Sometimes, they look more like people playing a part or holding onto a role that society has given them. In plate 39, Until His Grandfather, Goya shows a donkey proudly looking at his family tree. At first, the image is almost funny. The donkey seems serious and dignified, even though the whole situation is absurd. However, the humor also feels bitter. Goya is criticizing a society where status can be inherited rather than earned, and where people are respected because of family name instead of intelligence, character, or actual worth. The donkey is not frightening in the same way as the witches or bats in the later plates, but it still reveals something monstrous. It shows a world that rewards emptiness as long as it is dressed up as nobility.

Plate 55, Until Death, works in a quieter but equally unsettling way. The image shows an elderly woman looking at herself and continuing to perform beauty and desirability. At first, it could be read as a simple criticism of vanity. However, the longer one looks at it, the sadder it becomes. Goya is not only mocking old age or beauty. He is criticizing a culture that teaches people to cling to appearances, even when those appearances no longer feel real. The horror in this print is not loud or supernatural. It comes from watching someone trapped inside an image of themselves that they cannot let go of.

Paul Ilie’s writing on teratology, or the study of monstrosity and malformed bodies, helps explain this part of the exhibition. In Los Caprichos, distorted bodies often point to distorted values. Goya makes social problems visible through the body, turning corruption, dependence, and emptiness into physical forms. This can be seen in plates like Los Chinchillas, where the figures seem stuck in their own helplessness and lack of thought. They are not just strange individuals. They become signs of a larger social sickness.

The Supernatural and its Horrors:

The later plates in the exhibition move more fully into witchcraft and supernatural imagery. Plates such as 62, 68, 69, 72, 75, 79, and 80 are filled with flying bodies, strange rituals, hidden acts, and figures who seem caught between human and animal states. These images are some of the most disturbing in the group, but their meaning still connects back to society. Edith Helman’s scholarship is important here because she connects Goya’s monsters to Spanish Enlightenment thought and literary traditions. In this reading, the witches are not simply evidence of Goya’s fascination with the occult. They are symbols of ignorance, superstition, and corruption.

Plate 69, Blow, is especially unsettling because it turns ritual into something grotesque and bodily. The act taking place feels secretive, unnatural, and almost impossible to fully understand. Plate 72, You Will Not Escape, creates a similar feeling of helplessness. The title alone suggests that the victim is trapped before the viewer even understands the scene. Plate 75, Is There No One to Untie Us?, makes that helplessness more direct. The bound figures seem to ask for rescue, but the world around them offers none.

By the time the exhibition reaches plates 79 and 80, secrecy and exhaustion dominate. No One Has Seen Us suggests hidden behavior carried out in darkness, while It Is Time feels like the closing of a nightmare rather than a true resolution. Goya does not end with comfort. He ends with the sense that irrationality may retreat for a moment, but it has not disappeared.

Conclusion:

This exhibition presents Goya’s Los Caprichos not as a collection of separate disturbing images, but as a focused argument about the instability of human reason. The selected plates show a world where folly can look respectable, vanity can become tragic, and superstition can turn society into a nightmare. Plate 43 stands at the center because it gives the exhibition its clearest warning: when reason sleeps, monsters appear. Yet Goya’s deeper point is that those monsters do not come from nowhere. They are produced by people, institutions, habits, and fears.

What makes these prints so powerful is that they still feel recognizable. The clothing, rituals, titles, and social structures belong to Goya’s Spain, but the behaviors feel much broader. People still hide behind status. They still perform identities. They still confuse appearance with truth. They still look away from suffering until it becomes normal. Goya’s monsters disturb us because they are not only creatures of fantasy. They are reflections of human life when it loses the ability, or the courage, to see itself clearly.

Works Cited:

Helman, Edith F. “Caprichos and Monstruos of Cadalso and Goya.” Hispanic Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 1958, pp. 200–22. JSTOR, https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.2307/470875. Accessed 26 June 2026.

Ilie, Paul. “Goya’s Teratology and the Critique of Reason.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1984, pp. 35–56. JSTOR, https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.2307/2738305. Accessed 26 June 2026.

Moffitt, John F. “GOYA’S ‘SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS’: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE RENAISSANCE AND ROMANTIC CONTEXTS OF ‘LA FANTASÍA.’” Source: Notes in the History of Art, vol. 24, no. 1, 2004, pp. 36–43. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/stable/23207894. Accessed 26 June 2026.

Winkler, Mary G. “GOYA’S ‘CAPRICHOS’ AND CREATIVITY AT MIDLIFE AND BEYOND.” Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging, vol. 15, no. 2, 1991, pp. 21–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/stable/44877719. Accessed 26 June 2026.