Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Holofernes) Rather than confirming Goya’s “loca esperanza” (Sueño 199; “wild
hope,” Sleep 53) of being freed, these paintings are a bleak foreboding of more
violence and yet another nightmare. As Dowling has shown, Buero uses Saturno
here in keeping with art historical interpretations of its iconography, as reference
to the king who “destroys those who should have benefited from [him],” since
Fernando VII now turns on “those very people who helped to restore him, in
1814, to the Spanish throne” (453). The Aquelarre represents another reference to
the king as he-goat under whose command the demonic creatures, that is, the
Royal Volunteers, reap their havoc. The prominence of this painting throughout
Buero’s drama, and its enlargement at the end of the scene, when the other two
paintings disappear, indicates that Buero sees the Aquelarre as representative of
Goya’s Spain, his world of horror and cruelty.
Finally, the representation of the painting Judith links the second to the
first nightmare, since the first scene ends with Leocadia, Goya’s mistress, as the
“brazo secular” (Sueño 198; “secular arm,” Sleep 53) to which the beasts want to
give over Goya for execution. In fact, Leocadia, “ataviada como la Judith de la
pintura y con su gran cuchillo en la mano” (Sueño 198; “dressed as Judith of the
painting and with a great knife in her hand,” Sleep 53), is about to decapitate the
artist when they are interrupted by the noise of the intruding Royal Volunteers.
Although the tableau vivant of this painting of Judith in the first scene is thus
“frozen” back from life into art in the second scene, its continuing presence
emphasizes the ongoing threat to Goya. Moreover, this confrontation again
underscores a conflict between the artist and his art, as he is almost being
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