Goya Is Pure Horror

Francisco de Goya's paintings could easily look like something pulled straight out of a nightmare. Take this one for example. In this image, we see witches in cone-shaped hats levitating in the darkness of the night. Together, they clutch a naked man who struggles against them. They appear to be biting into his flesh as he throws his head back in anguish. Directly below them, a man with his head buried under a blanket gropes forward blindly, arms outstretched, thumbs pressed together in a gesture that, according to the superstitions of the time, was believed to ward off evil. From the darkness on the right, a donkey stares blankly ahead, while on the left, another man cowers face down, clutching his ears. It's a deeply unsettling painting, and yet it's far from the most terrifying thing Goya ever made. The story goes that it was in the late 18th century, as Goya grew increasingly fed up with the established order in Spain, that the darkest themes began to surface in his work. By then, a serious illness had left him deaf and ever more withdrawn from the world. Even so, he kept painting for the court while quietly building a parallel body of work, experimental and deeply disturbing, that he kept away from the public eye for a long time. At this point in history, the art world was largely dominated by religious imagery. Paintings of Christ, God, angels and saints were the images most people knew, so it's fair to say that very few canonised artists depicted witches, acts of evil or Satan himself, and none came close to doing so as often, or as vividly, as Francisco de Goya. When we try to understand why Goya shifted his style so drastically, we're faced with two possible readings, the literal and the ironic. The literal interpretation is that Goya, aware of the stories of moral and social decay spreading across Spain, was depicting the potentially real horrors of Satanism and witchcraft as a kind of 18th century horror genre for his wealthy patrons, who found these images thrilling. This literal reading feels more plausible when we consider his famous painting known as The Witches' Sabbath. It's a more straightforward image of witches, hag-like in appearance, sacrificing small children to please their goat-shaped master. The ironic reading of his dark paintings is that Goya wasn't attacking witchcraft at all, but rather the opposite, he was attacking the organised religious authorities that propped up From the Inquisition onward, Spanish authorities exploited rumour and hysteria among the lower classes around witchcraft practices, most notably during the Basque Witch Trials, which implicated thousands of people. Keeping fear of the occult alive guaranteed hope in the power of the church and faith in God. Fear-mongering, in other words, was simply a more effective way to keep the people in line. Even the more liberal interpretations of Goya's dark paintings go so far as to suggest that his depictions of witchcraft are satires of the priesthood, that the witches are symbols of priests exploiting the superstitions and fears of ordinary people. Throughout his career, Goya produced a series of prints called Los Caprichos, which were at once fantastical and sharply satirical. In his own words, the work was a response to Spain's history during Goya's career was deeply unstable. The French Revolution shook all of Europe and weakened the reign of Charles IV, who had been his main patron and came to be seen as Years later, things got worse. Napoleon, who had initially been an ally of Spain, made the decision to invade the country in order to enforce his economic blockade against Britain. Charles IV abdicated, his son Ferdinand VII was pushed aside, and Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, was installed as king under French occupation. The country descended into chaos, giving rise to the Peninsular War, an extraordinarily violent conflict marked by popular resistance and relentless reprisals, which left Spain impoverished, divided and deeply scarred. In the midst of the war, the Constitution of 1812 was born, a liberal project remarkably ahead of its time, one that championed civil liberties, the end of feudalism and political participation. Goya himself celebrated the moment by painting the Allegory of the Constitution of 1812, a work in which he depicted progress, reason, and the hope of a country trying to rebuild itself. But that momentum was short-lived. After the French were expelled, Ferdinand VII returned to the throne and immediately abolished the Constitution. Censorship returned, intellectuals were persecuted, and absolutism reasserted its grip. Spain entered a period of repression, disillusionment, and moral crisis that would profoundly shape Goya's final years and set the stage for the dark tone of his last works. By the time Goya painted his famous black paintings, he was already an old man in failing health. All of them painted directly onto the walls of his home, nicknamed La Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Death Man, for his own satisfaction and his eyes alone. Some of them, like Saturn devouring his sun and Jewel with Cudgels, are deeply allegorical and reflective, as is Witch's Flight, with its austere and timeless setting. They read as a commentary not only on the state of mind of an ageing Goya but on the fate of the Spanish nation, the nation he would eventually choose to leave behind in exile. Among them is a return to the themes of witchcraft and Satanism, a painting known as The Great He-Goat or Witch's Sabbath. Here, the witches sit in the presence of the devil, once again taking the form of a goat. Their distorted faces betray the horrifying vision before them, while an isolated veiled woman to the right of the group, possibly an initiate, sits apart and watches. The witches may well be hallucinating. It's said that during this period, witches would drink various potions and brews as part of these ceremonies, but it is our own vision of them that feels hallucinatory. The devil is rendered in sharp silhouette, while the coven of witches around him is distorted, painted as a synthesis of their inner state and their outward appearance. For us, what is truly unsettling is not the appearance of the goat but the people gathered before it. The witches seem less than human, abject, obedient, and intoxicated by superstition. In the context of the black paintings, The Great He-Goat is considered a horrifying satire of the descent into superstition of Spanish spiritual life. It's telling that on the wall directly opposite it, and painted to the same unusual dimensions, Goya placed a pilgrimage to San Isidro. In this bleak painting, a procession of pilgrims making their way to the hermitage of San Isidro in Madrid receives no kinder treatment from Goya's brush than the witches huddled before their goat-shaped devil. The figures at the head of the procession are distorted, mouths open in what appears to be a hymn. As the procession recedes into the distance, the congregation dissolves into the rocky landscape around them. At the far right of a pilgrimage to San Isidro, observing the main group of pilgrims, stands a more carefully rendered figure. This man occupies roughly the same position as the veiled woman seated to the right in The Great He-Goat. Both observers contemplate the horror before them from a removed position, to the right of their respective paintings. There is more than a hint that Goya is drawing a deliberate parallel between the two scenes. Now compare this with the Meadow of San Isidro. The exact same view painted in 1788, 10 years before Witches Flight and just before the French Revolution plunged Europe into chaos. Which raises the question, was Witches Flight already showing a shift in how Goya saw the world? Was he beginning to distrust the church, power and society itself? Were his first doubts, his critical eye already taking shape? We can't know for certain, but looking at the painting, there is a tension that is hard to ignore. Goya isn't simply depicting a strange scene, he is also revealing his own unease, his reaction to a world that was beginning to feel increasingly violent and irrational. In his darkest works, Goya shows us a world disordered by war and conflict, where values collapse and what appears good can ultimately prove dangerous. Goya's dark paintings are not merely fantasies designed to indulge our appetite for the occult and the supernatural, they are grave warnings from history. And Goya likely had more than one meaning in mind when he wrote the inscription, the sleep of reason produces monsters. Thank you for watching this video all the way to the end. I'd love to know what goes through your mind when you look at Goya's paintings and if you feel like there's something I missed, drop it in the comments. If you'd like to own any of these paintings, you can browse our catalogue and buy your favourites to start your very own art collection at home. Shipping is free worldwide and every purchase goes a long way in supporting me so I can keep making videos like this one every week. I'll leave the link in the description. Thank you for your support, and I'll see you in the next one.