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

Chapter 3:
Goya’s The Sleep of Reason in Poetry, Drama and Film:
Dramatizing the Artist’s Battle with his Creatures
INTRODUCTION
Francisco Goya’s Caprichos are inherently marked by conflict and
competition between words and images, reading and viewing. A series of eighty
etchings 85 published in 1799 accompanied by an announcement in the Diario de
Madrid as well as by written commentaries of disputed authorship, these works
are dialogical, polyphone, and profoundly ambiguous. As Juan Carrete Larrondo
and Ricardo Centellas Salamero have emphasized, “[l]os Caprichos de Goya
deben ser mirados y deben ser leídos” (“Goya’s Caprichos have to be looked at
and have to be read”). 86 Moreover, many of the Caprichos explicitly thematize the
activities of reading, writing, seeing and observing. Andrew Schulz has shown
how the “central perceptual tension” present in the works themselves as well as in
the Diario de Madrid advertisement, is the “dialectic between two types of vision
– observation and fantasy.” 87
85 The medium of the Caprichos is a combination of regular etching and aquatint. As Robert
Hughes explains in Goya (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), aquatint unlike etching allows an
effect of watercolor wash and gives a gamut of tones from delicate grey to a rich, velvety back of a
density that could not be rivaled by linear etching (178). Hughes goes on to emphasizes the
dramatic effect of aquatint in the Caprichos: “Those deep, thick, mysterious blacks against which
figures appear with such solidity and certainty and yet with such apparitional strangeness, that
darkness in which most detail is lost, so that one’s eye moves into a record of states of mind rather
than a description of a ‘real’ world – such effects owe their intensity to the aquatint medium”
(179).
86 “Mirar y leer los Caprichos de Goya. Palabras Preliminares,” Mirar y Leer: Los Caprichos de
Goya (Zaragoza: Diputación Provincial de Zaragoza; Madrid: Calcografía Nacional; Pontevedra:
Museo de Pontevedra, 1999), 13. All English translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
87 Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body [New York: Cambridge UP, 2005), 11.
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