Goya's etching, captioned "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos," "The sleep of reason produces monsters," shows a man slumped over his desk at night while owls and bats close in behind him. The Spanish word sueño means both sleep and dream, so the caption reads two ways, as a warning about a switched-off mind or as a claim that imagination cut off from reason breeds monsters. Handwritten commentaries on the series put the second reading into words.
According to the Prado, the sleeper is Goya himself. The print is number 43 in Los Caprichos, the Caprices: eighty etchings on the follies, vices and superstitions of Spain that went on sale in Madrid in February 1799.
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Quoted alone, the caption sounds like a lesson: switch off your mind and the monsters walk in.
Then look at who is asleep. Not a king, a priest or a fool, the usual targets of Los Caprichos. It is Goya, slumped on his own desk, in a series that until this plate mocks the follies of other people.
A man lecturing the public would hardly draw himself as the one who nods off. And the caption under him was not the first Goya wrote beneath this scene. The famous caption also leaves two things unexplained: why the sleeper is the artist himself, and what the creatures around him are up to.
What You'll Discover
The words he wrote first.
What one Spanish word hides.
What the animals are really doing.
Where plate 43 sits in the book.
What happened to the book.