Goya: Witches’ Flight and The Forcibly Bewitched

One man feeds a lamp because he believes that his life depends on it. Another one covers his head while, above him, several bodies float in darkness. The situations belong to two different paintings of Goya, The Forcibly Bewitched and Witches’ Flight, made for the Dukes of Osuna at the end of the eighteenth century. In both, fear forces action. What changes is how much the viewer knows about the cause of that fear.

The Prado dates Witches’ Flight to around 1798 and records its place in a series of six canvases sold to the dukes for their country house at La Alameda, outside Madrid. The painting measures 43.5 by 30.5 centimetres. It was not conceived as a large public spectacle: its scale invites the intimacy of a cabinet painting. Prado catalogue entry.

The lamp that sustains an imaginary life

The Forcibly Bewitched, held by the National Gallery, draws on a comedy by Antonio de Zamora first performed in 1698. Don Claudio has been deceived into believing he is bewitched and will live only while a lamp remains lit. The scheme aims to make him marry Doña Leonora. Goya selects the moment when the character replenishes the oil. The British institution interprets his exaggerated expression and posture as a mockery of credulity. The theatrical argument and painting of 1798.

The following visual reading uses the digital reproduction in that catalogue record. Claudio occupies the centre, dressed in dark clothes and a large hat. He leans towards a small flame on the left. His legs are apart and his body seems divided between the impulse to approach and the need to balance. One hand reaches towards the lamp; the other is drawn close to his face.

The gesture turns belief into effort. The character does not merely imagine a threat: he works to prevent it. From outside his deception, the action may seem absurd. From within it, it is urgent. Goya holds these perspectives together and lets viewers notice something Claudio does not know.

The great darkness and the minimal light reinforce that dependence. The flame occupies little space, but organizes all the action. It does not need to be great to dominate the character: it is enough that he considers it indispensable. The painting thus finds a visual form for a relationship of power. Whoever controls the explanation of the lamp also controls the movements of those who believe in it.

Comedy retains its shadow

Upright animal forms and limbs that seem to extend his agitation can be distinguished behind the protagonist. The National Gallery identifies them as a painting of dancing donkeys on the wall. Background description. This detail transforms what might appear to be an apparition into part of the setting for the deception.

However, knowing the argument does not erase the restlessness of the painting. The figures in the background are still great with respect to man and the darkness does not become a comfortable domestic space. Laughter has an explanation; the painting retains an atmosphere that exceeds that explanation. This tension allows to look at the work as satire without reducing it to an illustrated joke.

It also matters that the threat is made by other people. Comedy does not need to prove the existence of a spell to show its consequences. A shared lie can produce real obedience. The lamp works because someone has managed to impose an imaginary relationship between the oil consumed and the life of the protagonist.

Under the flying bodies

In Witches’ Flight, the explanation is less stable. The reproduction published by the Fundación Goya en Aragón, examined for this reading, shows a concentration of bodies at the top. Three figures with tall headdresses hold a naked man. Their arms and legs form a group difficult to disentangle at first glance. Below lies a dark space, interrupted by the figure covering himself with a pale cloth. Reproduction and documentation of the Goya Foundation in Aragon.

The cloth concentrates the light and reveals a paradox: the person trying to avoid what is happening becomes one of the painting’s most prominent points. He moves forward with his face partly hidden. Another man lies prostrate on the ground to the left; a donkey appears to the right. The lower portion gathers different responses to what dominates the air above.

We can interpret the composition as an unequal distribution of control. Above, several bodies carry another; below, someone tries to protect himself and someone appears defeated. Viewers see the whole while the characters limit their contact with it. That visual advantage does not fully resolve what is happening. It allows fear to be recognised before its origin is explained.

Blow, suck, interpret

The institutions do not describe the upper action identically either. The Prado considers that the figures are blowing air into the body they hold, noting their puffed cheeks. The Fundación Goya en Aragón records a blood-sucking interpretation and relates the scene to what the figures below imagine. These are different interpretations of a scene whose disturbing quality does not depend on hastily choosing one. Prado Reading and reading of the Foundation.

The difference is productive. The painting does not function as a record of an observed ceremony nor does it provide a closed narrative with beginning and end. Its pictorial precision coexists with an uncertainty about the action. We can stop at the contacts between bodies and continue without having a unique translation of what they do.

The Foundation documents a bill submitted by Goya on 27 June 1798 for the six witchcraft subjects, amounting to six thousand reales de vellón. The delivery account. The document returns these visions to a painter’s concrete labour and a relationship of patronage. Witchcraft was also a subject that could be commissioned, composed, paid for and contemplated in an aristocratic residence.

Two Ways to Not Be Safe

The comparison leaves a clear contrast. The Forcibly Bewitched, knowing comedy allows us to recognize the mechanism that dominates Claudio. Witches’ Flight, seeing more than the characters does not give us an equally safe explanation. One painting presents the trap; the other keeps open the experience of threat.

Both place fear in bodies that lean, cover or lose their autonomy. Satire does not need to suppress that intensity to question the beliefs that produce it. Goya can make us laugh at a superstition and, a moment later, let her image bother us. Between the superiority of those who understand the deception and the vulnerability of those who suffer it remains the space in which these pictures continue to act.

Sources and references

• Museo Nacional del Prado. Witches’ Flight, P007748.
• National Gallery. A Scene from The Forcibly Bewitched, NG1472.
• Goya Foundation in Aragon. Witches’ Flight, catalogue 525.