Detail of Witches Sabbath
Detail of Witches Sabbath, by Francisco Goya, 1819-23.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish painter and printmaker born in 1746 in Fuendetodos, Spain. He was a painter in the royal court and was a lead commentator on art in his era.
Commentary by Frederick S. Wight:
MEDIEVAL SUPERSTITIONS, THE BELIEF in witchcraft and in forbidden powers granted at a terrible price, were too powerful to be exorcized by the freethinking rationalism of the eighteenth century. Doubtless recalled from Goya’s earliest provincial childhood, they arose to give a familiar pattern to the disquieting imaginings of his isolated mind. The Witches’ Sabbath is typical of these so-called “dark paintings” which came out of Goya’s six-year solitude in the “deaf man’s house”—an exile in spirit to be followed by an exile in fact.
Goya lived among these strange and troubled canvases, hanging them in his two main rooms—around his dining-room table—as if to make sure that they were not hallucinations, that they were no more than paint.