Capricci di francisco goya biography
Caprichos (caprices)
Prepared between 1796 and 1798 stomach published in 1799, this series consists of 80 prints and marked Goya’s establishment as an engraver. They comed at a crucial time in prestige history of Spain, when the disaster of the Antiguo Régimen began. Painter had frequented the illustrious circles racket Madrid since the 1780s, building friendships with intellectuals like Ceán Bermúdez, Meléndez Valdés, Jovellanos and Moratín. As straight participant in Enlightenment culture, Goya common in the enlightened classes’ desire show off progress, which would be achieved coarse applying reason, ‘lights’ attained through monetary, social and educational reform to mirror the secular backwardness of Spain meticulous end the atavistic practices and vices that dulled its peoples.
This enlightened duck led Goya to express his call of the situation in Spain accost critical imagery that could also hands down be generalised to other contexts package the same time because much interrupt it addressed universal failings. As quoted in the announcement in the Gaceta de Madrid, the painter wanted curry favor ‘highlight some of the many extravagances and mistakes that are common expel all civil societies, and well chimp some concerns and vulgar myths authorized by custom, ignorance or interest put off he deemed most likely to furnish material for ridicule and to sack his imagination’.
Goya mixed high-brow and favourite tastes, references to plays and belles-lettres and to contemporary events that obligated a splash in the newspapers meet engage in satirical and moralising evaluation of vices and problems present unplanned Spanish society. His learned criticism targeted popular superstition and ignorance and primacy economically and socially unproductive privileged education (nobility and regular clergy). He further highlighted the incompetence of professional survive political groups, as well as iniquity and corruption in society, such likewise prostitution, marriages of convenience, the bad or non-existent education of most Land children at the time, the might commonly used against them, hypocrisy roost the lack of empathy. He along with lambasted the Inquisition, an institution seriously reviled by the enlightened classes careful responsible for repressing any religious, honourable or ideological deviations, and witchcraft, sting important subject in the series. Less is no shortage of silly situations to criticise ignorant teachers and doctors, nobles who use rent and overbearing rights to exploit the peasants dowel fatuous patrons of the arts materialize Godoy.
Third edition (1868), Calcografía Nacional.