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

intended meaning of the Caprichos” (85). The three main commentaries are
generally identified by the location in which they are kept. The commentary
which is now in the Prado was long believed to have been composed by Goya, but
most scholars now discount that possibility and attribute it to the writer and critic
Leandro Fernández de Moratín. 101 The Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid has another
commentary written in a more radical style and more crude language than the
Prado one. Finally, the Ayala manuscript (named after its first owner) has many
literal similarities with the one in the Biblioteca Nacional, but tends to be
shorter. 102 Moreover, while the Biblioteca Nacional and the Ayala commentaries
often try to nail down the depictions to specific historical characters, the Prado
commentary is much more vague and general. 103 On the whole, these
commentaries do not coincide in their interpretation of the images. Their semantic
pluralism indicates “the difficulty inherent in attempting to translate Goya’s
101 See René Andioc, “Al margen de los Caprichos. Las explicaciones manuscritas,” Nueva
Revista de Filologia Hispanica 33 (1984): 257-84. A few critics still maintain that Goya authored
the Prado commentary, such as Volker Roloff, „Zur Beziehung von Bild und Text am Beispiel von
Goya, Caprichos,” Spanische Bilderwelten: Literatur, Kunst und Film im intermedialen Dialog,
Ed. Christoph Strosetzki and Andre Stoll (Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert, 1993), 1-15. As proof of
Goya’s authorship, he cites the stylistic similarities between the commentary and the captions, and
the ironic relationship between commentary and image (3-8). However, Andioc uses this very
disparity to argue the opposite, namely that the author of the commentary is represented through
his text more as a spectator than as printmaker. Moreover, according to Andioc, the style of P has
no similarities to the inscriptions of the preparatory drawings, and much less to Goya’s other
known writings, such as letters (277-78). However, as Andrew Schulz has pointed out, even if it
was not composed by Goya himself, it probably appeared with the artist’s consent and, more
importantly, for the reader it “establishes an authorial position in relation to the works advertised,
regardless of whether Goya himself wrote it” (99).
102 For a thorough discussion of these manuscripts see Andioc 257-84.
103 For example, in Capricho 5 Tal para cual, the Prado commentary is a long paragraph on
weather men or women are worse, and speaks of the represented characters simple as “la señorita”
and “el pisaverde”. Ayala, by contrast, succinctly comments: “Maria Luisa y Godoy” (i.e. the
queen and the prime minister), and the Biblioteca Nacional text takes up that identification (“La
Reyna y Godoy cuando era Guardia”) but expands the description of the plate, making the
situation even more specific. (Texts quoted in Helman, Trasmundo 214.)
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