Witches' Sabbath is a 1798 oil on canvas by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. Goya used the imagery of covens of witches in a number of works, most notably in one of his Black Paintings, Witches' Sabbath or The Great He-Goat (1821–1823) which contains similar sharp political and social overtones. At the time, a bitter struggle raged in Spain between liberals and those in favour of a church and a royalist-lead state.[1]
Goya's depictions of such scenes - Witch hunting was one of the main preoccupations of the earlier Logroño Inquisition - mocked what he saw as medieval fears exploited by the established order for political capital and gain.[2]
Witches' Sabbath shows the devil in the form of a garlanded goat, surrounded by a coven of disfigured, young and aging witches in a moonlit barren landscape. The goat possesses large horns and is crowned by a wreath of oak leaves. An old witch holds an emaciated infant in her hands. The devil seems to be acting as priest at an initiation ceremony for the child, though popular superstition at the time believed the devil often fed on children and human foetuses. The skeletons of two infants can be seen; one discarded to the left, the other held by a crone in the centre foreground.
Typical of the imagery of witchcraft, many of the symbols used are inverted. The goat extends his left rather than right hoof towards the child, while the quarter moon faces out of the canvas at the top left corner.[3][4] In the middle high-ground, a number of bats can be seen flying overhead, their flocking motion echoing the curve of the crescent moon.
It is one of six of Goya's paintings on the subject of witchcraft owned by the Duchess of Osuna. Their origin is unknown; they may have been commissioned or bought by the liberal Duchess after they were completed.[5] It was intended as a protest against those who upheld and enforced the values of the Spanish Inquisition. It is an attack on the superstitious beliefs rife in Spain during a period when tales of midnight gatherings of witches and the appearance of the devil were commonplace among the rural populace, who lived in fear of what they believed were the dark elements of society.
The painting was purchased by the financier José Lázaro Galdiano, and donated to the Spanish state on his death. Today it is held in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.
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