"El sueño de la razón produce monstruos," "The sleep of reason produces monsters," has two meanings, because the Spanish word sueño means both sleep and dream. Read as sleep, the caption warns that a switched-off mind lets the monsters in. Read as dream, it says that imagination cut off from reason breeds monsters.
Goya wrote it under an etching of a man slumped over his desk at night while owls and bats close in behind him. Handwritten commentaries on the series put the second reading into words.
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 aimed at other people.
The sleeper is Goya himself, slumped on his own desk. Until this plate, Los Caprichos mocks the follies of other people, with a king, a priest or a fool as the usual targets.
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 first caption had no monsters
The Prado Museum in Madrid holds the drawing, made in 1797 in iron gall ink and black chalk. At the top Goya wrote "Sueño 1º," Dream 1. On the front of the desk he wrote "Ydioma universal," Universal language.
Below the scene came a caption: "The author dreaming. His only intention is to banish harmful vulgarities and to perpetuate, with this work of caprichos, the solid testimony of truth." Reason is nowhere on the sheet.
The words on the desk suggest that Goya first meant the scene to open the book, as its frontispiece, the opening picture. The series was going to be called Sueños, Dreams, after the satirical Dreams of the Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo, and the frontispiece of Quevedo's book served as a model for the drawing.
By the time Goya cut the copper plate, the scene had changed. The bright corner of the drawing turned dusky, night birds filled it, and the desk became a stone block carrying the new words. The scene also left the front of the book and landed at number 43. Through all of it, one word stayed: sueño.
What You'll Discover
What one Spanish word hides.
What the animals are really doing.
Where plate 43 sits in the book.
What happened to the book.