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(Capricci, 1743), and Giambattista Piranesi (Invenzioni capric… di carceri, c.
1745; Grotteschi, 1745-50), Goya was the first to imply a critical purpose, or a
social commentary (cf. Hughes 179-80). 93
This element of social criticism is explicitly present both in the
announcement in the Diario de Madrid, and in a preparatory drawing for
Capricho 43, entitled Sueño I. 94 In 1797, two years before the publication of the
Caprichos, Goya had planned a collection of seventy-two plates in which one of
the two preparatory drawings for Capricho 43, El sueño de la razón was supposed
to be the head-plate. Not only does the image itself differ visually, but moreover,
the inscription and commentary diverge from those of the final Capricho plate. 95
93 Jacques Callot was actually the first visual artist to use this term in the title of his series. As
Howard Daniel has noted, several Soviet critics “have found in the Caprices a record of the
contemporary class struggle and in their author a precursor of socialist realism” (“Introduction,”
Callot’s Etchings, ed. Howard Daniel [New York: Dover, 1974] xvi). Lucrezia Harmann in her
dissertation Capriccio – Bild und Begriff (Nürnberg, 1973) has pointed out that the term was also
used to describe literary texts and musical pieces, yet it does not refer to a specific genre but rather
describes a group of works with common features (49-55). The earliest literary caprichos are the
Capricciosi ragionamenti by Pietro Aretino (Paris 1534), the Capricci, Ragionamenti de le Corti
by Fra Mariano (Venezia 1538) and the Ragionamenti o Capricci di Giusto bottajo by G.B. Gelli
(Venezia 1546), who have in common a preference for scurrilous, extravagant ideas and a neglect
of the rules of poetics in favor of free invention and orginality (49). See also Schulz for a thorough
discussion on the use of the term “capricho” in eighteenth-century aesthetic definitions (100-1).
Sánchez Cantón also discusses the use of this term in writers and artists who may have influenced
Goya’s choice of it (7-9).
94 According to Schulz, there are 28 known Sueño drawings, and “virtually all Sueño drawings
provide a basis for plates in Los Caprichos” (70). “[Their] organizing principle […] is the notion
of cloaking the satire of the contemporary mores and fantastic scenes of witchcraft in the guise of
the dreams of the artist, a model surely based […] on the Sueños published in 1627 by Francisco
de Quevedo (1580-1645) and on the Sueños morales published c. 1726 by Diego de Torres y
Villarroel (1693-1770)” (70). However, as Andre Stoll emphasizes, all three works, the two Sueño
drawings and the Capricho 43, must be seen as coherent, self-sufficient systems of signification,
and in fact, he considers the drawings as superior to the final etching in terms of aesthetic
experience (19). See “Goyas Illumionatio – Zum ästhetischen Genesisbericht der Caprichos,”
Spanische Bilderwelten: Literatur, Kunst und Film im intermedialen Dialog, Ed. Christoph
Strosetzki and Andre Stoll (Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert, 1993), 19.
95 For an interpretation of the visual differences between the first and second version of the
Sueños, and the Sueños and the final Capricho 43 see, for example, John J. Ciofalo, “Goya's
Enlightenment Protagonist--A Quixotic Dreamer of Reason,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30.4
75