Goya's Witches' Sabbath: The Painting Where Reason and Superstition Met in the Dark

In 1798 Francisco Goya, then fifty-two years old and First Painter to the Spanish king, was commissioned by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna to produce six small oil panels of witchcraft scenes for the country house they were finishing at La Alameda outside Madrid. The six paintings — together known as the Osuna witch series — were intended as decorative cabinet pictures for a drawing room: small enough to hang in close conversation with each other, frankly entertaining in subject, and broadly in tune with the European late-Enlightenment fashion for the irrational as an object of fascination rather than of fear. The most famous of the six panels, and the one usually called simply The Witches' Sabbath, shows a circle of older women gathered around a large crowned he-goat in a moonlit landscape. The women are offering newborn babies, alive and dead, to the goat. The picture is forty-three by thirty centimetres — small enough to hold easily — and is the moment Goya's work begins its decisive shift from court portraitist to the painter of fear, ignorance, and the Spanish dark that the rest of his career would build on.

Francisco de Goya, Witches' Sabbath (El Aquelarre), 1798. Oil on canvas, 43 × 30 cm. A Madrid collection. The most famous of the six small witch panels Goya painted in 1798 for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna's country house at La Alameda. A circle of women offer their newborns to a crowned he-goat under a thin crescent moon — the central image of the European witchcraft tradition, painted in the exact year Goya was preparing the Caprichos etchings.

The 1798 commission: the Duke and Duchess of Osuna

Francisco de Goya, Self-Portrait, 1815. Oil on panel, 51 × 46 cm. A Madrid collection. The painter at sixty-nine, seventeen years after the 1798 Osuna witch commission. By 1798 Goya had been First Painter to the Spanish king for nine years, was the leading portraitist of the late-Bourbon Madrid court, and had been deaf since a serious illness in 1793 — a condition that visibly shaped the introspection of the work he produced from the Caprichos onward.

The Duke and Duchess of Osuna — Pedro de Alcántara Téllez-Girón and María Josefa Pimentel — were the most enlightened aristocratic patrons of late-eighteenth-century Madrid. They subscribed to the French Encyclopédie, maintained correspondences with Voltaire and Rousseau, founded one of the first private libraries in Spain to be opened to scholars, and built the country house at La Alameda specifically as a setting for the kind of intellectual entertainment that the conservative Spanish court did not permit. The Osunas had been buying Goya's work since the early 1780s; he had painted their family portrait in 1788 — one of the warmest aristocratic group portraits in eighteenth-century Spanish painting — and remained one of their closest artistic acquaintances for the rest of their lives.

The 1798 commission for six witch panels needs to be read inside that enlightened context. Witchcraft trials had been formally outlawed in Spain by the Inquisition's last major rulings in the 1610s, and by the late eighteenth century the educated Spanish reading public considered the historical witchcraft panic an embarrassing relic of medieval ignorance. The Osunas were commissioning the witch series as anthropological curiosities — pictures of what ordinary Spanish peasants of the previous century had genuinely believed, painted by the period's leading Spanish artist as an enlightened observation of pre-modern superstition. The pictures were, in their original 1798 context, a sophisticated joke about the Spanish past.

What the picture actually shows

Francisco de Goya, Witches' Sabbath (close-reading detail), 1798. Oil on canvas, 43 × 30 cm. A Madrid collection. The full panel, read object by object: the crowned half-goat half-man figure at centre, the older crone offering an emaciated infant, the younger woman lifting a healthy baby by the arm, the small skeletal infant forms scattered across the moonlit ground, the circling bats overhead, and the thin crescent moon in the upper right — every element taken directly from canonical European witch-trial sources.

The composition is structured around the seated central figure of the goat. He is in fact a half-human creature — the legs and lower body of a goat, the upper body and arms of a horned man, with a crown of vine leaves on his head and a small wreath of oak leaves at his belt. He sits upright on a low mound in the centre of the panel, his front hooves raised as if blessing the women in front of him. To his right, an older crone in a brown shawl holds out an emaciated newborn baby; to his left, a younger woman lifts a healthy infant by its arm. Behind them, scattered across the moonlit ground, are five or six tiny dead babies — clearly visible as skeletal forms, painted small against the picture's darker background. A flock of bats circles overhead. A thin crescent moon is just visible in the upper right corner.

The picture is small but its iconographic density is high. Every object Goya included is taken directly from the standard sources for European witchcraft mythology — the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), Pierre de Lancre's 1612 Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges, and the Spanish witch-trial transcripts from the Logroño cases of 1610 that the Osunas certainly knew about. The crowned he-goat is the canonical form the Devil was said to take at the witches' sabbath; the offering of babies is the standard charge brought against witches at trial; the bats and the thin crescent moon are the standard period iconography for night and the supernatural. Goya is painting, with deliberate scholarly precision, the exact mental picture an educated late-eighteenth-century Spaniard would have of what an actual witches' sabbath was supposed to look like — accurate to the texts, but obviously and pointedly absurd as a depiction of anything real.

Caprichos 43: "The sleep of reason produces monsters"

The Osuna witch panels were painted in the same year, 1798, that Goya was preparing his series of eighty etchings called Los Caprichos, published in February 1799. The most famous etching in the series is plate 43, in which a young man is shown slumped asleep at a writing desk while behind him a swarm of bats, owls, and lynxes rises into the air. Across the front of the writing desk Goya inscribed the Spanish phrase El sueño de la razón produce monstruos — "the sleep of reason produces monsters," or alternatively "the dream of reason produces monsters," since the word sueño in Spanish carries both meanings.

Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos plate 43: The sleep of reason produces monsters, 1799. Etching and aquatint, 21.6 × 15.2 cm. The motto-image of the eighty-print Caprichos series, prepared during the same year as the Osuna witch panels. The young man at the desk is conventionally read as a self-portrait of Goya; the bats and owls behind him are the same supernatural creatures that populate the 1798 witch panels.

The etching is the motto-image of the whole Caprichos project. The slumped figure at the desk is conventionally read as a self-portrait of the artist; the bats and owls rising behind him are the same creatures that populate the Osuna witch panels. The Caprichos as a whole are an enlightened catalogue of Spanish ignorance — corrupt clergy, lascivious aristocrats, exploitative officials, and the dense web of folk superstitions that, in Goya's 1798 view, kept ordinary Spaniards trapped in the medieval past. The witch panels and Plate 43 are therefore two halves of the same project: the witch panels show what the Spanish countryside thought it saw at night; Plate 43 explains what Goya thought was producing the vision.

Witches in the Air: the companion panel

A second of the Osuna 1798 witch panels — Witches in the Air (Vuelo de Brujas) — is the closest formal companion to the Witches' Sabbath. The picture shows three witches in pointed hats lifting a naked young man into the air; one of the witches has bitten down on the young man's torso and is in the process of draining his blood. Below them, on the ground, a second young man covers his ears and runs in panic toward the right edge of the picture, while a third man covers his head with a white sheet to hide himself from the witches' gaze. The composition is vertical, the figures are isolated against an almost black night sky, and the painting handles light in the same dry chalky manner as the Sabbath panel.

Francisco de Goya, Witches in the Air (Vuelo de Brujas), 1798. Oil on canvas, 43.5 × 30.5 cm. A Madrid collection. The vertical companion to the Witches' Sabbath in the Osuna witch series. Three pointed-hatted witches lift a naked young man into the air while the figures on the ground respond with terror and self-blinding — the picture is as much about the response to the imagined supernatural event as it is about the event itself.

What is striking about Witches in the Air is how much of the picture is given over to the figures on the ground rather than to the witches themselves. The two men below — the one covering his ears, the one hiding under the white sheet — are the picture's emotional centre. They cannot see the witches; they can only react to a sound they cannot interpret. Goya is painting, in 1798, what later writers would call the structure of moral panic: the supernatural event is imagined; the human response to it is real; and the human response is what does the actual damage to the people on the ground. The picture is therefore a layered allegory about Spanish superstition — what the witches do is fictional, what fear of the witches does is concrete and observable.

1820: The Great He-Goat (the Black Paintings)

Twenty-three years after the Osuna witch panels, between roughly 1820 and 1823, Goya returned to the witches' sabbath as a subject. He was seventy-four years old, deaf since a serious illness in 1793, living alone in a country house outside Madrid that he had bought in 1819 (and which had been called, before he bought it, the Quinta del Sordo — the House of the Deaf Man — after a previous deaf owner; the coincidence with Goya's own deafness was an accident of property history). He painted the interior walls of the house directly in oil — fourteen large compositions covering most of the wall surface of two ground-floor rooms. The paintings, applied without commission and intended for nobody outside his own house, became known after his death as the Black Paintings (Pinturas Negras).

Francisco de Goya, Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat), c. 1820-23. Oil mural transferred to canvas, 140.5 × 435.7 cm. A Madrid collection. The horizontal Black Painting wall-mural version of the witches' sabbath subject Goya had first treated as a small Osuna cabinet panel in 1798. The crowned he-goat now sits at the left edge, looming over a long compressed row of distorted female faces — the picture is no longer an anthropological joke for an enlightened drawing room; it is the painter alone in his own house twenty-three years later, painting fear directly.

One of the Black Paintings, on the wall of the ground-floor room sometimes called the Saturn Room, is a second version of the witches' sabbath: a long horizontal mural showing the same crowned he-goat at the far left, now silhouetted against an open landscape, with a tightly compressed line of forty or so female faces ranged in front of him along the entire breadth of the composition. The faces are distorted — some hag-like, some young, all rendered in a dry, brown, almost greasy paint. The earlier 1798 Osuna panel had been a contained anthropological scene; the 1820 mural is a panorama of human ugliness organised around the same iconographic centre. The same goat, the same female devotees, the same babies-as-offering tradition — but treated now as the painter's own private and unmistakably terrified picture of the human capacity for ignorance and cruelty.

Pilgrimage to San Isidro: the same dark mood

On the wall facing the Great He-Goat, in the same Saturn Room of the Quinta del Sordo, Goya painted a second great horizontal mural — A Pilgrimage to San Isidro — which depicts the annual San Isidro spring festival outside Madrid that he had painted twice before in earlier and lighter moods. The 1820 mural version is no longer the festival as Goya had treated it in the cheerful, light-filled 1788 cartoon The Meadow of San Isidro. The 1820 mural shows the festival as a slow procession of singing peasants moving toward the picture, their mouths open, their eyes black, their faces caught in expressions partway between religious ecstasy and grotesque blank fervour. The mural and the Great He-Goat hang facing each other across a single room. They are conceived as a single pair.

Francisco de Goya, A Pilgrimage to San Isidro (La romería de San Isidro), c. 1820-23. Oil mural transferred to canvas, 138.5 × 436 cm. A Madrid collection. The horizontal Black Painting mural hung directly opposite the Great He-Goat in the Saturn Room of the Quinta del Sordo. A slow procession of peasants advances toward the viewer in a state of dark religious ecstasy — the picture is a Catholic devotional festival rendered in the same brown and black palette as the witches' sabbath across the room.

The pairing is the structural argument of the late Goya. On one wall: peasants offering newborn children to the Devil under a crescent moon. On the opposite wall: the same peasants in a slow Catholic procession to the shrine of a local saint. Both pictures are painted in the same dry brown palette, both compress their figures into the same horizontal ribbon along the lower half of the picture, both treat the human face as a grotesque mask. The pairing argues that Spanish Catholic devotion and Spanish folk witchcraft are not opposites — they are two surfaces of the same continuous fabric of irrational mass behaviour. Goya, deaf and old, alone in his own house, painted this argument directly onto the walls he was eating his meals in front of.

Why these pictures still matter

The Osuna witch panels and the Black Paintings, taken together, are the first sustained body of European painting that takes fear and superstition as objects of clinical observation rather than as objects of devotion or of moralising warning. Earlier European painting had treated the supernatural either reverently (Catholic devotional images, sacred subjects) or didactically (the moralising witch scenes of Hans Baldung Grien, the demonic Bosch panels of the late Middle Ages, the satirical witch prints of Salvator Rosa). Goya is doing something different. He is painting the supernatural the way a modern observer paints a riot — from the outside, with the camera held steady, recording how human beings behave when they are afraid of something that may not actually be there.

Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, c. 1820-23. Oil mural transferred to canvas, 143.5 × 81.4 cm. A Madrid collection. The most famous of the Black Paintings — the Roman god Saturn eating one of his own infant children — painted on the wall of the upstairs dining room at the Quinta del Sordo in the same campaign as the Great He-Goat downstairs. The picture takes the canonical witch-trial charge of infanticide that Goya had first treated in 1798 and refigures it as a classical myth painted directly onto the wall in front of the seventy-four-year-old painter's own dinner table.

The line of European modern art that follows directly from these pictures — the Symbolist paintings of Odilon Redon and Félicien Rops, the early Surrealist work of Max Ernst, the wartime paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz, the deformed faces of late Picasso, the screaming popes of Francis Bacon — all sit inside the same tradition that Goya started in the Osuna cabinet panels and that he closed out, alone, on the walls of his country house. The Witches' Sabbath of 1798 was the first picture; the Great He-Goat of 1820 was the last. What sits between them is the entire idea of painting as a clinical record of human fear, and that idea is the one the twentieth century inherited and used to paint its wars.

Key takeaways

• Francisco Goya painted six small witchcraft panels in 1798 for the country house of the Duke and Duchess of Osuna at La Alameda outside Madrid. The most famous of the six — usually called simply The Witches' Sabbath — shows a circle of women offering their newborns to a crowned he-goat by moonlight.

• The Osuna commission was an enlightened anthropological project: the Osunas were subscribers to the French Encyclopédie and were collecting the witch panels as observations of medieval Spanish superstition rather than as devotional or moralising images. The 1798 picture is, in its original context, a sophisticated joke about the Spanish past.

• Every iconographic element in the 1798 panel is taken directly from canonical witch-trial sources — the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), Pierre de Lancre's 1612 treatise, and the Spanish Logroño witch trials of 1610. Goya is painting the exact mental picture an educated Spaniard would have of a witches' sabbath, accurately to the texts.

• The Osuna witch panels were painted in the same year (1798) that Goya was preparing the Caprichos etchings (published February 1799). The famous Caprichos plate 43 — "The sleep of reason produces monsters" — is the motto-image of the whole Caprichos project and the etched companion to the Osuna witch panels.

• Twenty-three years later, between roughly 1820 and 1823, Goya returned to the same subject in the Black Paintings — fourteen large compositions painted directly on the walls of his own country house outside Madrid. One of the Black Paintings, The Great He-Goat, is a horizontal mural version of the witches' sabbath subject; another, A Pilgrimage to San Isidro, paints a Catholic devotional festival in the same brown-and-black palette.

• The pair Great He-Goat / Pilgrimage to San Isidro, hung facing each other on opposite walls of the same room, is the structural argument of the late Goya: Spanish Catholic devotion and Spanish folk witchcraft are two surfaces of the same continuous fabric of irrational mass behaviour, and both can be observed in the same way.

• Goya's witch pictures are the first sustained body of European painting that takes fear and superstition as objects of clinical observation rather than as objects of devotion or moralising warning. The line of European modern art that follows directly from them — Redon, Ernst, Dix, late Picasso, Bacon — sits inside the tradition Goya started in 1798 and closed out on his own walls in 1820.

Browse Goya, Spanish Romantic, and Black Paintings prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.