Fantastic Vision (Asmodea)

What you're looking at

Two figures fly through the air above a broad, pale landscape. They are bundled together at the upper left, one behind the other, moving toward the right. The nearer figure, a man in a brown cloak, twists round and points urgently with his right hand toward a great flat-topped rock in the distance, on top of which stands a walled town or fortress. The figure behind him, wrapped in a billowing red cloak, has the lower part of the face covered and looks the other way, back over the shoulder.

Below them, the ground is dark and crowded with small, hurried figures: a group of riders and people on foot moving across the plain. At the bottom right, almost cut off by the frame, a row of soldiers lies or kneels in the shadows, aiming long guns toward the fleeing group. The sky is a livid yellow-gray, the same smoky color as the empty field in The Dog.

The canvas measures about 127 by 263 cm, a wide landscape format. The flying pair takes up a surprisingly small part of it; most of the surface is air, rock and plain.

The red of the second figure's cloak is the strongest color in the picture. Everything else is ocher, gray, umber and black, and the rock is built from pale, dry strokes that let the ground show through. That single patch of red pulls the eye to the flying pair before the viewer notices the violence going on below them.

What does Fantastic Vision (Asmodea) mean?

Goya gave none of the Black Paintings titles. The name Asmodea is usually credited to his friend the painter Antonio Brugada, who inventoried the house after Goya's death. It seems to be a feminine form of Asmodeus, the demon of the Book of Tobit. Asmodeus was also familiar to Spanish readers from Alain-René Lesage's novel Le Diable boiteux (1707), adapted from a Spanish original, in which the demon carries a student through the air over Madrid and lifts the roofs off its houses to show him the hidden lives inside. The idea of a spirit flying a mortal over a landscape to show him the truth fits the picture well, though Goya left no word to confirm it.

The scholars López Vázquez and, later, John F. Moffitt proposed a different source: the myth of Prometheus being carried to the Caucasus. Others simply prefer the neutral title the Prado also uses, Visión fantástica, Fantastic Vision.

The lower half of the picture is more concrete. The soldiers aiming at the fleeing group recall the firing squad of The Third of May 1808, and they have often been read as French troops from the Peninsular War firing on refugees. The writer Evan S. Connell noted that the great rock resembles Gibraltar, which became a refuge for Spanish liberals. On this reading the flying man points toward safety while war goes on beneath him, a possible reflection of Goya's own position in the early 1820s, a liberal in a country sliding back toward absolutism, who would soon leave for France himself.

Where it hung

Fantastic Vision was painted in oil on a wall of the upper room of the Quinta del Sordo, Goya's farmhouse across the Manzanares from Madrid, on the wall nearest the entrance. It faced Atropos (The Fates), which repeats the motif of figures floating over open country, and Fight with Cudgels. Beside it was The Holy Office. The four long landscape scenes give the upper room a different character from the ground floor, where Saturn Devouring His Son and the great crowd scenes hung.

Like several of the murals, it seems to have been painted over an earlier composition, which helps explain the patchy, layered look of the sky.

Transfer and condition

In 1873–74 the banker Baron Émile d'Erlanger, then the owner of the house, had the murals lifted from the walls and transferred to canvas under the Prado restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells. The transfer saved them but cost paint and added retouching. D'Erlanger showed the canvases at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878 and gave them to the Spanish state, which accepted the gift in 1881.

What to notice

Look at the two flying figures' heads. They face in opposite directions, the man toward the rock, the cloaked figure back toward the soldiers. Goya builds the whole picture on that split: one looks at escape, the other at danger. Then look at how the man's cloak swells toward us, a curve that makes him seem to come out of the picture. It is the same distortion Goya used for the floating Fates on the opposite wall.

Where to see Fantastic Vision (Asmodea) today

The painting is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, catalogued as Visión fantástica or Asmodea. It hangs with the other Black Paintings in a single room on the ground floor of the museum.