Linda maestra!

FRANCISCO DE GOYA (1746-1828)

Print number 68 of the Los Caprichos series, 1799.

12th edition, 1937, Calcografía National.

Etching and aquatint on Japan paper with Ministry of Public Instruction seal.

Numbered on the reverse “11”.

Good condition. Full margins.

Goya conceived Los Caprichos as a way to combat the vices and absurdities of human behavior. His prints dealt with issues related to marriages of convenience, infidelities, and the consequences of bad education, but also to the institutions that protected and encouraged these forms of behavior, especially the church or the aristocratic establishment.

Within this set of engravings, those that could be grouped around the theme of witchcraft stand out, combining practices in which superstition, credulity and ignorance were evident in a particularly cruel way.

For the enlightened, initiation into witchcraft constituted a particularly perverse form of education in ignorance and degradation. Goya denounces this form of teaching in “Linda Maestra“, where an elderly witch initiates her young disciple into the most canonical of enchanted flights: riding a broom. Goya delights in describing the old woman’s decrepit body as if with This would indicate the degradation of their teachings. In the manuscript of the Biblioteca Nacional it is noted “las viejas dan lecciones de volar por el mundo” (“the old women give lessons in flying around the world”), alluding in turn to their condition as pimps.