Witches' Sabbath

Goya painted this straight onto the plaster wall of his own house outside Madrid sometime around 1820. He was in his seventies, stone deaf, and had lived through war, plague and the return of the Inquisition, and he covered his walls with fourteen dark scenes now called the Black Paintings. He never meant anyone to see them. On the left a huge goat, the Devil in silhouette, hunches over a row of old women crowded together in the dark, their faces slack with fear as they lean in to listen. Most readings take it as Goya's disgust at superstition and at the witch trials Spain had run for centuries. He never signed or titled it. Only around 1874, fifty years after his death, was the crumbling plaster peeled off the wall and moved onto canvas so it could hang in the Prado.