Die Beschwörung

In 1798 Goya sent the Duke and Duchess of Osuna a bill for six paintings on the theme of witches, made for the country house they kept outside Madrid. This is one of them. A cluster of witches crowds around a terrified man by night, one holding a basket, the shapes of bats and an owl in the dark air above. The Osunas were among the most enlightened aristocrats in Spain, readers and reformers, and they hung these scenes of superstition as knowing entertainment rather than belief. Goya would return to witches again and again in the years ahead, in his prints and later on his own walls. Here the whole drama plays out in a narrow band of light against the blackness.