Goya’s Witches

Francisco Goya, Witchcraft Series, 1797-98, oil on canvas, approx. 43 x 30 cm.,

for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna
 ↓

Goya, Sign Language, 1812, drawing

Goya, A Couple Struggling, 1812, drawing
Goya, The Spell, 1797-98
Goya, Capricho 9, 1799, etching
Goya, The Third of May 1808, 1814
“Tristitia animi signo” (I show mental anguish),
John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural
Language of the Hand and Chironomia: or the
Art of Manual Rhetoric, 1644

This gesture is “the sluggish expression of those

who have fallen into a melancholy muse.”
Raphael Sadeler (after Marten de Vos), Melancholy, 1580s, engraving
 Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of
Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, engraving
Melancholy, 1628.
Samuel van Hoogstraten, The Anemic Lady, c. 1670
Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628):

“The means by which they [witches and

magicians] work are usually charms, images .
. . constellations, knots, amulets, words,
philters, etc., which generally make the
parties affected [by] melancholy.”

Richard Baxter, The Signs and Causes of

Melancholy (1716):

“I do not call those melancholy who are

rationally sorrowful for sin, and sensible of
their misery . . . as long as they have sound
reason, and the imagination, fantasy, or
thinking faculty is not crazed or diseased;
but by melancholy I mean this diseased
craziness, hurt, or error of the imagination.”
Alessandro Allori, Ulysses and Circe, 1575-76,
fresco, Palazzo Salviati, Florence
Paulus Bor, A Melancholic Witch, c. 1640 Genovenismo, A Melancholic Witch, c. 1650
Jacques de Gheyn II, Preparation for the
Witches’ Sabbath, c. 1610, engraving
George Woodward, John Bull Troubled with Jean-Baptiste Boudard, Imagination, in
the Blue Devils, 1799, engraving Iconologie, etching, 1759 (derived from
Ripa’s Iconologia, 1603)
Goya, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos, Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces
plate 43 of Los Caprichos, 1799 Monsters, 1797, first preparatory study
Pierre Bayle, 1703:
“The imagination . . . will be stronger than
sight, and will paint its objects as if they
were present, in such a way that although a
person may be awake he will believe that
one sees a thing which is not present to the
eyes, but only to the internal senses.”

Samuel Butler, 1659:

“[melancholic’s] sleeps and his wakings
are so much the same, that he knows not
how to distinguish them, and many times
when he dreams, he believes he is broad
awake and sees visions.”
Melancholy with fearful delusions
(“Melancholie mit angstvollen
Wahnvorstellungen”), in Max Leidesdorf’s
Lehrbuch der psychischen Krankheiten,
Erlangen, 1865
Goya, Flying Witches, 1797-98
Goya, Inquisition Scene (detail), c. 1816

higa (fig)
Laocoön and his Sons, early first century CE,
marble, 2.13 m. high
Johan Wierix, attr., after Gerard van Groeningen,
Christ Healing a Demoniac, c. 1574, engraving.
Andrea del Sarto, Saint Philip Delivering a
Demoniac, 1514, fresco, S. Maria
Annunziata, Florence

Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires

prodigieuses, Paris, 1598
Rubens, The Miracle of St. Ignatius
Loyola, 1617
Crespy, Witches’ Sabbat, engraving in Laurent Bordelon, L’histoire des
imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle, vol. 2 (Paris, 1710)

* Oufle: an anagram of le fou (the mad)

Ascension Resurrection
Transfiguration
Raphael, Transfiguration, 1519,
oil on wood, 405 x 278 cm.
Possession vs. Obsession

Martin Schongauer, St. Anthony Tormented

by Demons, ca. 1470-1475, engraving
 :‫(על הקיר משמאל‬
‫אילוסטרציה של פול‬
‫ יושב ראשון‬,‫רישר‬
)‫מימין‬

The Lecture of the French psychiatrist Jean-

Martin Charcot, photo, 1887.

arc de cercle
Second Stage of the Hysterical Crisis: The Clown Period, in
Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, Les démoniaques dans
l’art (Paris, 1887)