Si amanece nos vamos

FRANCISCO DE GOYA (1746-1828)

Print no. 71 of Los Caprichos, 1799.

12th edition, 1937, Calcografía Nacional.

Etching and water ink on old Japanese paper with seal of the Ministry of Public Instruction.

Numbered on the reverse “11”.

Good condition. Full margins.

Goya’s Los Caprichos series is, without a doubt, the most corrosive portrait of the world of witchcraft. These engravings respond to a precise historical context: when in Spain the Old Regime and its most anachronistic institutions, such as the Holy Inquisition, were beginning to come to an end but refused to disappear.

At the end of the 18th century, to satire on witchcraft was to do so on the remains of a superstitious and ignorant world that had prevailed in times past but that had to retreat before the lights of an enlightened society. However, this satire of the world of witches also carried an implicit criticism of the ecclesiastical institution that, through the Inquisition, had prospered by fueling the scarecrow of these superstitions.

In the whim titled “Si amanece nos vamos” (“If it dawns we leave”) Goya seems to play with the idea of daylight as a symbolic image. In the same way that the witches’ cabals were convened at night and dissolved at dawn, that obscurantist world of sorcerers and inquisitors who insulted the reasoning and dignity of man had to be swept away with the arrival of the lights of knowledge and science.