Madrid, around 1819. Francisco de Goya is old, ill, and profoundly tired of the public stage. Once the darling of the Spanish court, he has watched kings fall, friends executed, and revolutions curdle into repression. Deaf for three decades, he lives almost inside his own skull. At the edge of the city, in a modest house nicknamed the Quinta del Sordo—the Deaf Man’s Villa—Goya begins to paint not canvases for patrons, but walls for himself.
On the plaster of his dining room and upstairs rooms, he brushes out a series of dark, disturbing visions: a colossal god devouring his child, a ragged procession stumbling through the night, witches in a circle, a man half-buried in earth with only his head above ground. Today we call them the Black Paintings. They were never titled or explained by Goya; they were never meant for exhibition. They are, in a sense, what happens when an artist no longer needs to be understood—only to speak.
What are the Black Paintings?
The term “Black Paintings” refers to a cycle of fourteen murals Goya painted directly onto the plaster walls of his villa between about 1819 and 1823. Decades later, they were painstakingly transferred to canvas and are now housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
Among them are some of the most unsettling images in Western art:
- Saturn Devouring His Son: an aged Titan, wild-eyed, consuming the body of one of his children against a black void.
- Witches’ Sabbath (or The Great He-Goat): a horned goat looming over a ring of emaciated figures in a nocturnal landscape.
- Pilgrimage to San Isidro: a crowd of grotesque, mask-like faces trudging toward a barely glimpsed horizon.
- Men Reading: a huddle of men bent over a sheet of paper, mouths drawn tight, eyes hollowed out by shadow.
- Two Old Men Eating Soup: toothless, skeletal faces hovering over a bowl of thin broth, their gestures both comic and ghastly.
These are not tidy allegories. They seem to arise from nightmares, from overheard mutterings, from the sense that reason itself has been exhausted. And yet, they are painted with exquisite control: Goya’s brush is never more economical, his colour never more pared down to essentials.
If you’ve read my earlier Painter’s Anecdote on Goya’s deafness, you’ll know he had already turned inward long before the Black Paintings. Here, the inwardness becomes architecture: his entire house becomes a kind of skull you can walk into.
History closing in: war, inquisition, and disillusion
To understand these pictures, you need to feel the historical weather pressing on Goya’s life. Over the previous thirty years, he had watched Spain tilt violently:
- The Enlightenment had promised reason and reform; Goya admired its ideals and mingled with liberal thinkers.
- The Peninsular War (1808–1814) brought Napoleonic invasion, brutal guerrilla resistance, and ferocious reprisals. Goya’s series The Disasters of War etched mutilated bodies and firing squads into copper.
- The Inquisition and reactionary forces reasserted themselves after the war. Friends of Goya’s were exiled, imprisoned, or worse.
By the time he bought the Quinta del Sordo around 1819, Goya was in his seventies, in fragile health, and surrounded by political suspicion. He lived with his much younger companion Leocadia Weiss and members of her family. The Black Paintings were, in part, his answer to this claustrophobic Spain: images of madness, superstition, failed pilgrimage, and devouring power that he dared to put on his own dining-room walls.
Think of them as opposites to the cheerful religious canvases that lined other Spanish homes. Where most domestic images of the time offered consolation—a saint, a Madonna—Goya offered the blunt question: what if consolation is a lie?
Saturn’s hunger: power that eats its children
Let’s stand, imaginatively, before the most infamous of the cycle: Saturn Devouring His Son. In the Prado’s canvas, a gigantic, naked figure crouches against a black background. His hair is wild, his eyes rimmed with white, pupils small with horror. With bloodied hands he grips the torso of a half-eaten body; his mouth gapes around a chunk of flesh. There is no throne, no mythological decor, only the act and the darkness.
In classical myth, Saturn (the Roman equivalent of Cronus) devours his offspring to prevent the prophecy that one of them will overthrow him. Artists before Goya had painted this as a tragic, almost sculptural allegory: handsome bodies, balanced composition, a sense of inevitability. Goya strips all that away. Here Saturn is not majestic; he is naked, terrified, and out of control. His body is stringy, almost ageing; his hands look more like an animal’s paws than a god’s.
What Goya paints is not just the story, but the emotion inside the story: the madness of a power that tries to secure itself by consuming exactly what should succeed it. The child’s head is gone; the torso is limp, almost doll-like. The horror is not just in the devouring, but in the futility—you can feel that this will not, in the end, save Saturn from his fate.
For Goya’s Spain, still reeling from tyrannies, restorations, and purges, the image surely read as a political allegory. But he never writes it down. He leaves us this: a vision of authority so frightened that it becomes cannibalistic, painted where he would see it every day.
Witches, processions, and the theatre of belief
Not all the Black Paintings are as immediately violent as Saturn. Some work more corrosively, eating away at the viewer’s sense of stability.
Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)
In this long, low canvas, a horned goat looms over a group of women and a few men gathered in a moonlit clearing. The figures are gaunt, their faces mask-like, their posture a mix of fear and eagerness. The goat—often interpreted as the Devil—tilts his head and listens. But look at Goya’s brushwork: the goat’s body is not anatomically solid; it seems to dissolve into the night. The witches’ garments are painted with wide, dry strokes that make them look like bedraggled banners.
This is belief as theatre, but no one seems fully in control. Are these villagers surrendered to superstition? Are they victims of the Church’s obsession with witchcraft? The painting refuses a single answer. Goya sets up a dark sermon and then smudges the doctrine, leaving us with a sense of dangerous credulity on all sides.
Pilgrimage to San Isidro
In Pilgrimage to San Isidro, a mass of figures trudges toward the right, some raising glasses, some singing, some staring blankly out at us. The foreground faces, especially a grinning, hollow-eyed woman and a man in a bicorne hat, look almost like caricatures—but the longer you look, the sadder they become. Their mouths open, but you sense no true joy, only habituation.
Goya had painted a cheerful, sunlit Romería de San Isidro (Pilgrimage) decades earlier. Here, the same subject has turned sour. The saint’s meadow is now a swamp of brown-greys, and the faces float like masks on a muddy tide. It is as if the promise of communal festivity has curdled into mere habit: people moving by inertia, singing because they always have, not because they still believe.
Brushwork at the edge of abstraction
Visually, the Black Paintings are startling if you know Goya only from his court portraits and early tapestry designs. Here the palette has collapsed into earth tones, greys, blacks, sickly ochres; the paint surface is rough, often thin in some areas and crudely thick in others.
Look at the sky in Pilgrimage to San Isidro or the murky backgrounds of Men Reading and Two Old Men Eating Soup. Goya lays down broad, loose strokes that barely bother with description. Faces are sometimes built from a few dragged lines and blobs of lighter paint: two sickle-shaped strokes for eye sockets, a smear for a nose, a snaggle of pale for teeth. From close up it almost dissolves into abstraction; only at a few steps’ distance do the forms coalesce into grim masks.
This looseness is not incompetence—it is deliberate economy. After decades of highly finished commissions, Goya knows exactly how little he can get away with. The result is a pictorial language that feels astonishingly modern: we are not far from the expressive deformations of Expressionism. Yet unlike later avant-gardists, Goya has no manifesto to accompany the style. The walls simply show what his hand does when no client is watching.
If you’d like more vocabulary for this kind of looking—how texture, edge, and economy work—my Glossary of Art Techniques is a friendly companion, and you’ll spot echoes of Goya’s brush in discussions of impasto, scumbling, and broken stroke.
Private murals, public afterlife
One crucial thing to remember: the Black Paintings were never meant to be seen by us. They were part of the domestic skin of Goya’s house: above doors, wrapped around corners, looming over the table where he and his family ate. Their scale and placement shaped how they were experienced. Imagine spooning soup under Saturn and Two Old Men Eating Soup, each meal a kind of uneasy parody.
After Goya left Spain for Bordeaux in 1824, the house passed through other hands. In the 1870s, a new owner realized the murals’ importance and commissioned the artist Salvador Martínez Cubells to transfer them onto canvas—a risky process that inevitably altered their surfaces. They were later donated to the Spanish state and entered the Prado’s collection in 1881.
So when we stand in the Prado today, we see the Black Paintings out of habitat: flattened, framed, cleaned, lit like conventional pictures. We can be grateful they survived at all, but it’s worth keeping in mind that their original power included their very placement in daily life. They were not made for the reverent space of a museum, but for the uneasy intimacy of a dining room and stairwell.
Goya’s evolution: from court painter to painter of the unsayable
Seen against Goya’s earlier work, the Black Paintings trace a stark artistic evolution.
- 1770s–1780s: Tapestry cartoons and court portraits. Elegant, lively scenes—picnics, dances, children’s games—painted in bright Rococo colours for the royal palaces. Even here, Goya’s eye is sharp, often inserting small notes of fatigue or mischief.
- 1790s: Illness and deafness. The mysterious ailment that left him deaf opened a more introspective, often more satirical phase. His Caprichos etchings satirise superstition, hypocrisy, and folly.
- 1808–1814: War and disillusion. The Disasters of War etchings and paintings like The Third of May 1808 confront state violence head-on, with raw, unsentimental clarity.
- Post-war: Late portraits and private monsters. Goya still paints splendid portraits of friends and patrons, but alongside them he makes the Black Paintings—a double life of public refinement and private exorcism.
By the time he takes up the walls of the Quinta del Sordo, the courtier’s polish has peeled away. What remains is an artist unafraid to show incoherence, repetition, and fear. Yet even at his darkest, Goya’s work is never sloppy. In our Technique Tuesday on Goya’s glazing, we saw how delicately he could make a red child’s suit glow against velvet shadow. That same technical discipline underlies the Black Paintings; only now, the subject is not aristocratic velvet, but the fabric of human panic.
How to read the Black Paintings without reducing them
It is tempting to treat each Black Painting as a puzzle with a single solution: this figure “stands for” this political faction, that goat “means” this doctrine. Goya himself resists such flattening. He gives us fragments of narrative—a feast, a procession, a coven—but refuses to label, to moralise, or to tidy his symbols.
A more fruitful approach is to read them the way we read dreams or late-night conversations: for tone, pattern, and recurring fears. If you use the method I outline in How to Read a Painting (in 7 Steps), try this:
- Start with your body. Where does your gaze go first? Do you feel crowded, watched, unsteady on your feet? Do you want to step back or lean in?
- Trace the light. Note where the few pale tones concentrate: faces, hands, bits of sky. Goya uses light sparingly, like brief moments of awareness in a fog.
- Listen for echoes. Compare figures across different paintings: the toothless old, the clutching hands, the blankly staring eyes. You’ll start to sense Goya’s recurring cast of inner demons.
- Resist final summaries. Let the contradictions stand: are these scenes of satanic frenzy or of credulous villagers? Are processions sacred or absurd? Goya’s answer is often “both, uncomfortably.”
The Black Paintings are not there to be solved; they are there to be lived with—as Goya himself lived with them—until their unease seeps quietly into your understanding of history and of yourself.
Why they still matter
Two hundred years on, the Black Paintings feel eerily contemporary. Their themes—disillusion with politics, distrust of institutions, the sense that violence and folly are cyclical—speak easily to our own age. So does their form: raw, experimental, uninterested in pleasing anyone.
Standing among them in the Prado, you realise you are not looking at quaint “Old Masters,” but at a mind wrestling with how to paint when hope is thin and illusions have worn out. Goya does not offer solutions. There is no comforting light breaking through the clouds, no saint stepping in to tidy the scene. There is only the stubborn act of painting itself: a human hand, deaf to the world’s chatter, dragging pigment across a wall in order to say, “This is what it feels like.”
If you’d like to follow the thread of how light and darkness carry such emotional weight from Caravaggio to Goya and beyond, you might enjoy my piece on chiaroscuro, or the broader meditations on light in Seasonal Sacred Art: Lamps, Leaves, and a Night of Watching.
Until then, the next time life feels a little mad, remember Goya painting his walls in the dark: not to decorate, not to reassure, but to keep his perceptions honest. That, too, is a kind of courage.