Процессия флагеллантов

Goya painted this small panel around 1814, just as the world it shows was returning. Ferdinand VII had come back to the Spanish throne, scrapped the liberal constitution, and restored the Inquisition. Public penitential processions of this kind had actually been banned by earlier reformers as barbaric. Here a file of men in white robes and tall pointed hoods whip their own bared backs until they bleed, hauling over-lifesize statues of the Virgin and the suffering Christ through a crowd. Goya, who despised fanaticism, made it one of a set of cabinet pictures he kept for himself, scenes of Spanish life he found cruel or absurd, among them a madhouse and a tribunal of the Inquisition. The heat of the day sits in the pale dust and the flat bright light.