Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)

What you're looking at

A crowd of women sits on bare ground at night, packed so tightly that their faces merge into one mass. At the far left, outlined against a muddy sky, looms a huge black silhouette: a goat with curving horns, wrapped in what looks like a monk's habit, seen from behind as it addresses the crowd. The faces turned toward it are gaunt, wide-eyed and slack-mouthed, some rapt, some terrified, some simply vacant.

In the middle foreground a figure in a white hood and robe sits with its back to us, a pale shape that pulls the eye into the center. At the far right, set slightly apart from the coven, a young woman sits alone on a chair in dark clothes, her hands tucked into a muff. She does not look at the goat. She is the one figure in the scene who seems untouched by the spell.

The canvas is enormous, about 140 by 436 cm, and painted almost entirely in black, brown, ocher and a few dirty whites. Goya builds the faces from quick, broken strokes, so that close up they dissolve into marks and from a distance resolve into a crowd of grimaces.

What does Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) mean?

The scene is a witches' sabbath, or aquelarre, the night gathering where, according to Spanish and Basque witch lore, witches met to worship the Devil in the form of a he-goat. The word comes from the Basque akelarre, "the field of the he-goat." The title El gran cabrón, "The Great He-Goat," was given by Goya's friend the painter Antonio Brugada after Goya's death; Goya himself named none of the Black Paintings.

Most scholars read the picture as satire, not belief. Goya was a man of the Spanish Enlightenment, and he had attacked superstition before, most famously in the Caprichos prints of 1799, where witches fly, cast spells and plot under the eye of credulous Spain. His friend the playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín published a mocking annotated edition of the records of the 1610 Logroño witch trial. In this light the coven is not a gathering of real witches but a picture of credulity: ordinary people hypnotized by a dark figure dressed like a cleric.

That reading takes on a political edge in the years Goya painted it. After 1814 Ferdinand VII abolished the liberal constitution and restored the Inquisition. A mass of frightened people kneeling before a robed preacher reads easily as an image of a country in the grip of fear and fanaticism.

The young woman at the right is a separate puzzle. Some writers see her as a novice or postulant about to join the coven; others have suggested she is Leocadia Weiss, Goya's companion, who lived with him at the house and who is probably the subject of La Leocadia.

An earlier witches' sabbath

Goya had painted this subject before. In 1797–98 he made a small, bright Witches' Sabbath for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, now in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid. There a garlanded goat sits among women offering him babies under a moonlit sky, and the tone is close to theatrical comedy. Twenty years later, on his own wall, the goat has become a faceless silhouette, the crowd has swollen and the joke has gone.

Where it hung, and what was lost

The mural was painted in oil on a long wall of the ground-floor room of the Quinta del Sordo, Goya's house outside Madrid, facing A Pilgrimage to San Isidro. The two friezes answer each other: a nocturnal coven on one wall, a nocturnal pilgrimage on the other, both crowds of gaping faces led by something they do not understand. The same room held Saturn Devouring His Son and Judith and Holofernes.

When the murals were transferred to canvas in 1873–74 under the Prado restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells, for the banker Baron Émile d'Erlanger, a long strip of about 140 cm was cut from the right side of this composition. That is why the seated young woman now sits so close to the edge, and why the picture's weight seems to slide toward the goat. D'Erlanger showed the canvases in Paris in 1878 and gave them to the Spanish state, which accepted them in 1881.

What to notice

Find the goat's face. You can't. Goya shows the Devil only from behind, as a black cut-out with horns, so every expression in the picture belongs to the people looking at him. The real subject is the audience. Then find the one face in profile at the right, the young woman with the muff: she is lit more softly than anyone else, and she looks away.

Where to see Witches' Sabbath today

The painting is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, which catalogues it as El aquelarre or El gran cabrón. It hangs with the other Black Paintings in a single room on the ground floor, usually opposite A Pilgrimage to San Isidro, as it was in Goya's house.