Los zancos

By 1791 Goya was a successful court painter who had grown tired of one particular job: designing cartoons, the full-size painted models that weavers copied into tapestries for the royal palaces. This was among his last, made for the king's office at the Escorial. It shows a village amusement, two men striding on tall stilts through a crowd while pipers play and ordinary people look up. The cartoons paid well but bored him, and soon after he gave them up for good. Within a few years a grave illness would leave him deaf and push his art somewhere far stranger and darker. Here, though, the mood is still bright, a sunlit country holiday seen slightly from below so the stilt-walkers loom against the sky.