Goya: the Witches and Old Women Album
Courtauld Gallery, London WC2
It was not a writer or a philosophe who came up with the pithiest encapsulation of Enlightenment thinking ever coined, but an artist. The aphorism “The sleep of reason produces monsters” was inscribed by Francisco Goya on a celebrated image that shows the artist asleep at his desk while a nightmarish murmuration of lynxes, owls and bats swirls up from the darkness around him. For Goya, the creatures of the night released from his imagination represented the ills that afflicted Spain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries: a corrupt and self-serving church, a flawed monarchy, a rapacious aristocracy and a populace in thrall to superstition. The print was part of Los Caprichos (the caprices), a satirical collection of etchings published in 1799. Ten days after the volume appeared, Goya withdrew it from sale for fear of the Inquisition: reason, as he saw it, was still in a sleep so deep as to be almost comatose.
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