Los Caprichos. Plate 32. Por que fue sensible (Because she was susceptible).

Los caprichos are a set of 80 prints in aquatint and etching, created by the famous Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798, and published as an album in 1799. The prints were an artistic experiment: a medium for Goya's condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society in which he lived. The criticisms are far-ranging and acidic; he speaks against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical shortcomings, marital mistakes and the decline of rationality. Some of the prints have anticlerical (anti-church) themes. Goya described the series as depicting "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual".

The work was an enlightened critique of  late 18th-century Spain, and humanity in general. The informal style, as well as the depiction of contemporary society found in Caprichos, makes them (and Goya himself) a precursor to modernism almost a century later.

Goya's depiction of an incarcerated young woman is the only plate in Los caprichos to have no etched lines and is formed solely through aquatinting. Consequently the depth and intensity of the darkness mirrors the emotions of the subject. These are excellently described by Robert Hughes in his book Goya (New York, 2003): 

'Not all of his prison scenes... were of victims of the Inquisition. Perhaps nowhere in his graphic work is there a deeper expression of pathos and fellow feeling for the condemned than in Capricho 32, Por que fue sensible ('Because she was impressionable'). It is a portrait of a woman who was condemned to die for conspiring with her younger lover to kill her older husband. Maria Vicenta, whose trial and execution were among the sensations of Madrid in ... 1798. A beautiful woman sits in jail, surrounded by darkness of such intensity that it seems almost to be gnawing at her, eroding her fragile form. Her body, hands resting on her knees, forms a right triangle, the kind of absolutely stable and elementary composition Goya favored in his graphic work. Her head is bowed, and her expression is of silent, inward distress... High up in the cell door is a rectangular spy hole, through which she can be observed. A crack of light beneath the ill-fitted door only reinforces the sense of carceral gloom... It is entirely painterly, rendered only in brushstrokes. It is a tour de force of the aquatint medium, and its softness, its almost liquid delicacy, only serves to emphasize the terrible inequality that it is its subject: the iron machinery of punishment poised to crush una mujer sensible into the grave" (p. 199).

See:

Robert Hughes, Goya (New York, 2003)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_caprichos

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   July 2017