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

images into textual form” and show how the Caprichos “accommodate a range of
meanings” (Schulz 118).
In contrast to the more radical-specific stance of the BN manuscript, the
Prado commentary generally tends to blunt the visual edge of the Caprichos,
hiding their real intentions in order to delude the censor by adopting a naïve,
harmless tone. 104 As Rene Andioc has shown (278-79), often the Prado
commentaries take up a dialog with the captions of the images, for example,
Capricho 7 is entitled: “Ni así la distingue” (“Even like this he can’t make her
out”), and the commentary asks: “Cómo ha de distinguirla…” (“How is he
supposed to make her out? ...”). Yet, this harmlessness of the Prado commentary
is often ironized by the image itself, an irony which indicates the ability of the
Caprichos to contradict the verbal meaning of their texts. The relationship
between text and image here is largely marked by irony, distance, paradox, and an
intertextual play with quotes.
This relationship is complicated even more by the fact that Goya has
derived many of his themes from literary texts, articles, poems or comedies,
attempting to achieve through his prints what the writers achieved through their
texts (Helman Los Caprichos 42-43 and Trasmundo 53). 105 The legend of
Capricho 43, for example, has been traced to various different literary sources.
One is the already mentioned satirist Francisco de Quevedo, whose 1726 edition
104 Cf. Oto Bihalji-Merin, Francisco Goya: Caprichos: Their Hidden Truth, Trans. John E.
Woods. (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 13.
105 Helman discusses in particular a number of literary sources of the donkey series, Caprichos 37
to 42 (Trasmundo 69-77). According to José Manuel B. López Vázquez, the Caprichos as a whole
are based on or related to Goya’s reading of Erasmus’ L’Eloge de la Folie and don Diego
Saavedra Fajardo’s Idea de un Príncipe Político y Cristiano (14).
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