Goya's Black Paintings - Witches's Sabbath

It really must be admitted that things seen in sleep are, as it
were, painted images, which could have been produced
only in the likeness of true things.-Rene Descartes,
Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy'
Fowl take flight as an unearthly entourage of powerful male
nudes, infant victims, an old crone, goats, and strange skeletal
yet animate creatures rush along to the sound of a horn,
perhaps also wind and wailing. A solitary witch squats amid
the hindquarters
of a Leviathan-like skeleton,2 directly above
a crouching male nude, the bottoms of his feet thrust toward
the viewer (not to mention his buttocks), whereas four fully
extended nudes, three of them so youthful as to be yet
unbearded, propel themselves forward through the pictorial
space like stallions at a canter.
Lo stregozzo, or the procession
to a witches' Sabbath,3 is a
large engraving (almost 12 by about 25 inches) of debatable
but early sixteenth-century date, whose inventor and engraver
are uncertain (Fig. 1). The existing scholarly consensus that
the print be classified as essentially Roman and basically High
Renaissance in design is reconsidered here. Such a concep-
tion of this work, at the very least, fails to do justice to the
complexity of its reference. But I hope to establish more than
a dismantling of this engraving's usual classification: I believe
this object documents a very rare intersection between
heretical and artistic instances of fantasia. By addressing a
pressing dispute about the manifestations of demonic power,
which hinged on determining the boundary between imagina-
tion and fact, this work of art-relatively little known today--
was intended to play an unusually critical role in molding
opinion about extra-artistic matters in early modern northern
and central Italy. The crux of Lo stregozzo lies less in simply
recognizing the subject, which is not learned, than in answer-
ing the following question: Does it represent this nocturnal
cavalcade as fact or fiction? Even the learned held differing
opinions about this question.