El Sueño de la Razon Produce Monstruos
El sueño de la razon produce monstrous, “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” is plate 43 in an 80 plate series of thematically linked etchings and aquatints entitled “Los Caprichos,” Goya’s largest graphic work to date. In the series Goya demonstrates greater technical ability and intellectual growth, achieving a new mastery of the power of the graphic image. The series was produced when he was fifty-three years old and had just recovered from a long, debilitating illness which left him morose and almost deaf. During his recuperation, Goya read extensively about the ongoing French Revolution; it is thought he had access to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s radical treatise, Philosophie (1793), whose engraved title pages show a man leaning his head on a desk, with owls, bats and a cat, the same pictorial elements that appear in Goya’s print.
The man in El sueño is the artist himself, dreaming of the scenes portrayed in the series. Allegorically, he is the ‘Spanish citizen,’ caught in the upheaval of a morally corrupt society and the religious and political persecution that was the terror of the Inquisition. The lynx watching alertly in the lower right corner represents secretiveness; the bats and owls refer to the supernatural and to wisdom; the bat with the goat face represents the devil. In addition to etching, Goya used the aquatint process to create gradations of dark and light shadows which give a haunting, emotional quality to the nightmarish scene.
Initially, Goya intended to begin the series with this plate. However, fearing political and clerical repercussions due to the bold caricatures, he reconsidered and placed it deeper into the album. For the same reason, many captions of the “Los Caprichos” plates are ambiguous. Nevertheless, the clamor caused by the prints was so great that they had to be removed from sale after only twenty-seven sets had been bought. In 1803, Goya was rescued from the threat of the Inquisition by King Carlos IV, who favored the artist, after Goya gave him all the remaining unsold sets and the copper plates.
