The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Francisco Goya · plate 43 of the eighty of Los Caprichos · etching and aquatint on one copper plate, printed in intaglio on laid paper · one upright field about the size of a book page: a man asleep with his head on his arms at a squared block, owls and bats rising behind him out of the dark, a lynx awake at his feet · titled on the face of the block in letters etched into the image · first edition offered for sale in Madrid in February 1799 · the unit scored is plate 43 as an edition, the image as it stands in good impressions of the first edition; the copper plate survives in the Calcografía Nacional, Madrid, and the later editions pulled from it, the other seventy-nine plates and the preparatory drawings are context
Mode
Satirical print turned nocturnal; emblem, confession and frontispiece in one image, published as the hinge of a set of eighty
Mythos
The sleeper visited by the creatures of the night; the melancholic maker idle at his block; the owl of wisdom gone over to the dark
Phase
One night and no event; drawn in 1797 to 1798, etched and published in Madrid in February 1799, withdrawn after a short time, the plates given to the Crown in 1803
Presentation
Etching and aquatint on copper, printed in intaglio on laid paper, upright and about the size of a book page; plate 43 of 80, its title etched into the image
Register
Dread, cold and still: a black that lightens toward one lit body, pale owls’ faces, two open eyes at the foot
Scale
One man, one block, one night, on a sheet held in the hand
Governing Proposition
A man has put his head down on his arms at a squared block that carries the title of the print, and behind him owls and bats rise out of an aquatint darkness, the nearest owl holding a drawing tool out toward his hand while a lynx at his feet lies awake and looks out. The wager of the plate is that the night which reason lets loose is made by the same faculty that makes art: that sleep and dream are one word and one danger, that the monsters are also the material of the plates that follow, and that a tone process meant for copying can be made into the darkness itself, on a copper plate the size of a book page, multiplied and sold.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, born in 1746 and a painter to the court, made the drawings of 1797 to 1798, now in the Prado, for a series of Sueños that was not published in that form. What he published instead was Los Caprichos, a set of eighty prints in etching and aquatint, offered for sale in Madrid in February 1799 from a shop in the calle del Desengaño. The set mocked clergy, nobility and superstition while the Inquisition was active, and it was published at his own cost. It was withdrawn from sale after a short time. In 1803 Goya gave the copper plates and the unsold sets to the Crown, and the plates went to the Calcografía, where they still are.
The plate scored here is the forty-third of the eighty. It opens the second half of the set, which turns from social satire toward witches, goblins and the night, and it is the one image of the set that stands alone as a work, in what it means and in how it has been received. The unit is plate 43 as an edition: the image etched and aquatinted on one copper plate and printed in the first edition, judged as it stands in good first-edition impressions. Its place as the hinge of an eighty-plate set is read as part of its form, because the edition is how the work was made public. The other seventy-nine plates, the drawings and the later editions are context, and are not scored.
The field is upright and about the size of a book page. A man in a coat and breeches sits with his head buried in his crossed arms on a squared block or desk, with papers and a porte-crayon, a drawing holder, laid on it. Behind and above him owls and bats rise out of an aquatint darkness that runs from near-black at the top to lighter tones nearer the figure. One owl at his back holds a drawing tool out toward him. A lynx lies at the right foot of the block, its head up and its eyes open, facing out. On the front face of the block the title is etched in letters that belong to the image: “El sueño de la razon produce monstruos”.
Movement II
Nothing in the plate is ornament. The sleeper is the subject and the hinge. The block carries the title, and it is the plinth of reason, squared and solid, on which reason has put down its head. The owl with the drawing tool is the turn of the whole image, and the lynx is the one creature awake and looking out, the watcher in the dark who sees, so that the viewer is bound into the scene by its eyes. The darkness is where the creatures are made. What yields is count and mass. The bats are a swarm, and the swarm could be smaller or larger without loss: the multitude is permitted rather than required.
The title states one proposition: when reason sleeps, monsters come. The Spanish word holds two. Sueño is sleep and it is dream, and the image keeps both readings open. Reason asleep lets the monsters loose; reason dreaming produces them. The second is the darker and the more modern proposition, that a rationality left to itself has its own nightmares, and the image, not the title, is what gives it. The man’s face is hidden in his arms, and whether he is Goya is an open question the plate does not answer.
A manuscript commentary on the plates, kept in the Prado, glosses this one in a sanctioned sense: imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters, and joined with reason it is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders. The gloss is a reading of the print, not the print. The core of the meaning is announced in words on the plate itself, and what the image adds beyond them depends on an ambiguity the viewer must supply; that is what holds the disclosure where it stands. What it adds is real: the creatures are not only threats.
Movement III
The owl at the sleeper’s back holds out a drawing tool, and the plate turns on it. The night is handing the sleeping artist his instrument. The monsters become the material of the plates that follow, the witches and goblins of the set’s second half, and the faculty that makes them is the faculty that makes art. Whether he will take the tool is not shown. The owl is the bird of Minerva, the attribute of wisdom, and in this plate it has gone over to the dark: what belonged to reason is now one of the creatures of its night.
The structure is the oldest image of the night of the soul, the sleeper visited by the creatures of the dark, and behind it the melancholic maker, head down, instruments idle, at a block of stone. Dürer’s Melencolia I, which stands at 8.8 on this desk, is the plain ancestor, down to the bat in its sky and the words carried inside its image. Here the archetype is built, not quoted: sleeper, block, owl and lynx are the plate’s whole argument. The particular survives in the man’s coat and breeches and his own papers, but he is anonymous and generic, and the archetype is clearer than the individual.
The inheritance is the satirical print and the emblem of the Enlightenment, Hogarth’s series and the allegorical frontispiece, and the Venetian etched capriccio of Tiepolo’s Capricci and Scherzi: images whose authors stand outside folly and point at it. Goya puts the satirist himself, asleep, at the centre of the nightmare, and the monsters come from him. The image of reason that should introduce a moral programme becomes the image of that programme’s failure, set at the hinge of the set. The stake was carried by the whole of Los Caprichos more than by this plate: a court painter publishing a set of that kind at his own cost, then withdrawing it, then placing its plates under the Crown.
Movement IV
Aquatint was a tone process made for reproduction. In this plate it is the substance of the night. The grain is laid at full depth at the top and graded through several tones to the light round the figure, and the owls’ pale faces and bodies are held out of it so that they come forward. The creatures emerge from a tone rather than being drawn on a ground: the monsters are made of the darkness itself, which is what the plate knows. A drawing of the same idea would keep the sleeper and the creatures and lose the night they are made of; the loss would be real, though partial.
The etched line does the other half. It gives the man and the lynx their solidity: the lynx is drawn crisply enough to be the one fully seen creature, the coat and the block take their weight from firm hatching, and the bats are a flurry of quick bitten strokes that read as motion. Line and tone are the two orders of the picture, and the lettering, placed on the block as a carving, joins them. The costs are named. The bats at the upper left are a scribble that fills more than it builds, the anatomy under the coat is summary, and the plate’s beauty depends on the quality of the impression, so that its making is fragile in a way a painting’s is not.
One law governs the field. Everything is ranked by its distance from the sleeper’s lit body and by its wakefulness: the nearer and more lit, the more fully drawn; the farther and darker, the more a creature dissolves into the aquatint it came from. The lynx at the lower right, solid and awake, and the bats at the top, black and blurred in flight, obey it at its two ends. The block, the papers and the title are the lit, squared order of reason, and the night presses on them from behind. Nothing breaks the law. What it governs is narrow: one man, one night, one register of dread, on a sheet held in the hand.
Movement V
For the first decades the plate moved little. The set had been withdrawn in 1799, and it was little seen in Spain. Then its reach widened. Delacroix copied from the Caprichos; Baudelaire wrote on Goya’s fantastic prints; Redon’s lithographs À Goya, of 1885, answer the night of this plate; the Surrealists claimed it. It became the emblem by which the dark side of the Enlightenment is named, and its title has entered common speech. Much of that reach belongs to the set and to Goya’s late work, and this plate became their emblem after the fact. Saturn Devouring His Son, on a wall of his house some twenty years later, stands at 8.7 on this desk, and The Third of May 1808 at 9.0.
The literature of about 227 years has not closed. Sleep or dream, and so whether reason is absent or is itself the dreamer; whether the plate is Enlightenment satire or Romantic confession, or both; how the Prado gloss stands against the image; whether the sleeper is Goya; what the owl offers and what the lynx sees; why the image stands at plate 43, the hinge between satire and witchcraft; how it reads after 1808 and after the twentieth century’s uses of reason. The arguments circle a meaning the title fixes, and they have not exhausted it. The Persistence of Memory, a dream image of another century in its line of descent, stands level with it at 8.6.
The copper plate went to the Calcografía, and later editions were pulled from it through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In them the aquatint is progressively worn and the plate steel-faced, so that what most people have seen is a weakened state of the image; the wear is a fact of survival and is not charged to the maker. Good impressions of the first edition are held in many public collections, among them the Prado, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum, where paper is kept from the light and shown in turn. In them the night still thins toward one lit body, the owl still holds out the tool, and the lynx at the foot of the block is still awake.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged figure by figure. The sleeper cannot go: he is the subject and the hinge. The block cannot go: it carries the title as part of the image, the squared plinth on which reason has laid its head. The owl holding out the drawing tool cannot go: it is the turn of the plate, the night handing the sleeping artist his instrument, the point at which the monsters become the work. The lynx cannot go, the one creature awake and looking out, which binds the viewer into the scene; nor the darkness, where the creatures are made. What yields is count and mass: the bats are a swarm, permitted rather than required, and the swarm could be smaller or larger without loss.
Score: 8.4 / 10
What can be stated holds. When reason sleeps, unreason does not wait: the mind’s own night makes monsters, and it makes them out of the faculty that makes art. The title states the first half; the image discloses the second, since the owl puts the drawing tool in reach of the sleeper and the creatures become the material of the plates that follow. Sueño is sleep and dream at once, and the image keeps both open: reason asleep lets monsters loose; reason dreaming produces them, the darker and more modern proposition. Held where it is because the core meaning is announced in words on the plate, and the disclosure beyond it rests on an ambiguity the viewer must supply.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is of one kind and real: dread, the sublime of obscurity and the night. The rising mass of wings out of black aquatint, darkest where it is farthest from the sleeper, gives the plate its height; the lynx’s open eyes and the owls’ pale faces close at the man’s back are its second and third summits. The register is cold, it recurs wing on wing through the swarm, and the stillness of the helpless man makes the night larger than its sheet. Held lower for two reasons: grandeur of scale is not available to a plate the size of a book page, and the plate rises in one register only, with no counter-elevation of beauty or transport.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Built, not evoked. The structure is the oldest image of the night of the soul, the sleeper visited by the creatures of the dark, and behind it the melancholic maker, head down, instruments idle, at a block of stone; Dürer’s Melencolia I, with its bat in the sky and its words carried inside the image, is the plain ancestor. The owl, bird of Minerva and of wisdom, is turned into a creature of the night: the attribute of reason has gone over to the dark. These bear the load, since sleeper, block, owl and lynx are the plate’s whole argument, and the particular is kept in a man of the 1790s in coat and breeches. Held here because the figure is anonymous, the archetype clearer than the man.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance: the satirical print and emblem of the Enlightenment, Hogarth’s series and the allegorical frontispiece; the Venetian etched capriccio, Tiepolo’s Capricci and Scherzi; the didactic image whose author stands outside folly and points at it. The swerve: the satirist puts himself, asleep, at the centre of the nightmare, and the monsters come from him; aquatint, a tone process made for reproduction, becomes the medium of the dark; the frontispiece of a moral programme becomes an image of its failure. The stake was real: a court painter publishing at his own cost a set that mocked clergy, nobility and superstition while the Inquisition was active. Held below the top because the whole set carried that stake more than this plate.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Much of it. The knowledge is that the monsters come out of darkness, and here they are made of it: aquatint at full depth, lightening toward the figure, so the creatures emerge from a tone rather than being drawn on a ground. The etched line gives the man and the lynx their solidity; the aquatint gives the night its substance; the two techniques are the two orders of the picture. The title, etched on the block, is a thing in the image’s world. The print form belongs to what it knows: a multiplied image, a public address, the hinge of a numbered sequence. Held below the top because the idea survives as a drawing, with real but partial loss.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise: about 227 years of a literature that has not closed. Sleep or dream, and so whether reason is absent or is itself the dreamer. Whether the plate is Enlightenment satire, superstition breeding while reason rests, or Romantic confession, the artist’s imagination unbound, or both, and how the manuscript commentary on the plate stands against the image. Whether the sleeper is Goya. What the owl offers, and whether the artist will take it. What the lynx sees. Why the image stands at plate 43, the hinge between satire and witchcraft. How it reads after 1808 and after the twentieth century’s uses of reason. Held here because the title fixes the central meaning and the arguments circle it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The work is published, so force and reach are scored together, in European printmaking and in Spanish art from the 1790s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a print could be: the satirical print made a vehicle of the nocturnal and the unconscious, aquatint made expressive rather than reproductive, the artist’s own imagination set at the centre of the image as its problem. The discount: the set was withdrawn in 1799 and little seen in Spain for decades, and much of the reach belongs to the set and to late Goya. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Delacroix copied from the Caprichos, Baudelaire wrote on Goya’s fantastic prints, Redon answered this night in his lithographs À Goya of 1885, the Surrealists claimed it, and its title has entered common speech.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 227 years. Form: whole. The image is the image Goya etched and printed; good impressions of the first edition survive in many public collections, and the copper plate survives. Presence: withdrawn from sale soon after publication, given with the other plates to the Crown in 1803, known chiefly through later editions and collectors in the nineteenth century, and present without break since the Romantic reception; fame counts as presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: paper is kept in the dark and shown in rotation, and the later editions from the worn, steel-faced plate coarsen the aquatint, a charge on the presence of the true image more than on its form.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged as command of etching and aquatint on a small copper plate. The making is load-bearing, because the meaning is in the tonal scale. The aquatint is graded from near-black at the top through several tones to the light round the figure, the owls’ pale faces and bodies held out of the grain. The line is economical and exact: the lynx drawn crisply enough to be the one fully seen creature, the coat and the block given weight by firm hatching, the bats a flurry of quick bitten strokes that read as motion. Word, line and tone are one act. The costs: the bats at the upper left are a scribble that fills more than it builds, the anatomy under the coat is summary, and the plate’s beauty depends on the impression.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the lynx at the lower right, solid, lit and awake, and the bats at the top, black, blurred and in flight. One law holds them. Everything in the plate is ranked by its distance from the sleeper’s lit body and by its wakefulness: the nearer and more lit, the more fully drawn; the farther and darker, the more a creature dissolves into the aquatint it came from. The block, the papers and the title obey the same law as the night; they are the lit, squared order of reason, and the night presses on them from behind. Nothing contradicts the law. Held here for range: one man, one night, one register of dread, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, as sleep, dream and the faculty of reason; art, in the instruments and the owl’s offer, so that the work of making is part of what is shown; the natural order, in the creatures of the night; and, through the title and the set the plate opens, the social order of an Enlightenment Spain at odds with its superstitions and its Inquisition. One figure integrates them: reason, art and the night meet at his back. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour beyond the artist’s, no state shown, no history but what the title implies, the sacred only as its inversion. It is one man at one block on a plate the size of a book page, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, then The Made at 9.0, then The Swerve, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. An image whole in its form after about 227 years, in many first-edition impressions and in the copper plate itself; a command of aquatint and line in which the tonal scale is the meaning; a satirist who put himself asleep at the centre of the nightmare; a literature that still argues whether reason sleeps or dreams; and a plate that remade what a print could carry, answered by Delacroix, Baudelaire and Redon.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: consciousness, art, the night and, through the set, the Spain of the Inquisition are held in one figure, but family, labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent, and the field is one man at one block. Below the rest, The Sublime at 8.2 and The Inevitable at 8.4: dread in one register, without the grandeur a sheet the size of a book page cannot give; and a swarm of bats permitted rather than required.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.2, The Swerve at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear it by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 102.8, an average of 8.57 that displays 8.6, four tenths short of the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the print as an image and as an edition, of the set it belongs to, its drawings and its literature; from impressions and reproductions known, not from a census of impressions, and no impression or written source was consulted for this page. The work scored is plate 43 of Los Caprichos, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos, as an edition: the image etched and aquatinted on one copper plate, printed in intaglio on laid paper and published in the first edition, offered for sale in Madrid in February 1799, and judged as it stands in good first-edition impressions. The impressions are witnesses to that image. The copper plate survives in the Calcografía Nacional, Madrid; the later editions pulled from it, worn and steel-faced, count as facts of survival and are not charged to the maker. The other seventy-nine plates, the preparatory drawings of 1797 to 1798 in the Prado and the manuscript commentaries on the plates are context and are not scored. The only words quoted are the title as etched on the plate; the Prado gloss is paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the exact dimensions of the plate mark, any technique beyond etching and aquatint, the day the sale was announced and the size of the first edition and how much of it sold, the number of later editions, the terms on which the plates passed to the Crown, the number and description of the preparatory drawings and the words inscribed on one of them, the count of the creatures and a second cat behind the figure, and whether the sleeper is a self-portrait.