Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)

This article is about the painting now in the Prado. For the similarly named painting now in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, see Witches' Sabbath (Goya, 1798).

In an array of earthen colours, a black silhouetted horned figure to the left foreground presides over and addresses a tightly packed group of wide-eyed, intense, scary, elderly and unruly women
Witches' Sabbath, 1821–1823. Oil on plaster wall, transferred to canvas; 140.5 × 435.7 cm (56 × 172 in). Museo del Prado, Madrid
Merging of two photographs by Jean Laurent taken in 1874, before the removal of badly damaged landscape to the far left and right during the transfer to canvas. The cutting down significantly altered the painting's centre of balance

Witches' Sabbath or The Great He-Goat (Spanish: Aquelarre or El gran cabrón[1]) are names given to an oil mural by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, completed sometime between 1821 and 1823. It evokes themes of violence, intimidation, ageing and death;[2] Satan hulks in the form of a goat in moonlit silhouette over a coven of terrified old witches.[3] Goya was then around 75 years old, living alone and suffering from acute mental and physical distress.

The work is one of the fourteen Black Paintings that Goya applied in oil on the plaster walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo. The series was completed in secret: he did not title any of the works or leave a record of his intentions in creating them. Absent of fact, Witches' Sabbath is generally seen by some art historians as a satire on the credulity of the age,[4] a condemnation of superstition and the witch trials of the Spanish Inquisition. As with the other works in the group, Witches' Sabbath reflects its painter's disillusionment and can be linked thematically to his earlier etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters as well as the Disasters of War print series, another bold political statement published only posthumously.

Around 1874, some fifty years after his death, the plaster murals were taken down and transferred to canvas supports. Witches' Sabbath was much wider before transfer – it was the broadest of the Black Paintings. During the transfer about 140 cm (55 in) of the painting was cut from the right-hand side.

  1. ^ Spanish titles from, respectively, Hughes, 386 and Boime, 110
  2. ^ Murray, 446
  3. ^ Boime, 111
  4. ^ Lima, 180