page_title: Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)
section_title: Restoration
hierarchical_section_title: Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) / Restoration
context_page_description: Witches' Sabbath or The Great He-Goat are names given to an oil mural by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, completed sometime between 1821 and 1823. It explores themes of violence, intimidation, aging and death. Satan hulks, in the form of a goat, in moonlit silhouette over a coven of terrified witches. Goya was then around 75 years old, living alone and suffering from acute mental and physical distress.
  It is one of the fourteen Black Paintings that Goya applied in oil on the plaster walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo. The paintings were completed in secret: he did not title any of the works or leave a record of his intentions in creating them. Absent of fact, Witches' Sabbath is generally seen by some art historians as a satire on the credulity of the age, a condemnation of superstition and the witch trials of the Spanish Inquisition. As with the other works in the group, Witches' Sabbath reflects its painter's disillusionment and can be linked thematically to his earlier etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters as well as the Disasters of War print series, another bold political statement published only posthumously.
context_section_description: Between 1874 and 1878 restorer Salvador Martinez Cubells was tasked with retouching the goat's horns and a number of the witches' faces. He removed more than 140 cm (55 in) of landscape and sky to the right of the postulant witch, where the paint had been badly damaged. This alteration significantly shifted the work's centre of balance; the young woman was no longer near the middle of the composition, thus reducing both her prominence and the possibility that she is seen to be the focus of the work.
  Some art historians have speculated that the area removed was beyond restoration since it is unlikely that such a large section of painting by an artist of Goya's stature would be lightly discarded. Still, the removal may have been for aesthetic reasons, with the empty space on the right viewed as unnecessary; its removal intended to bring balance to a canvas perceived as overlong. If this was Cubells' reasoning, it was misguided (he was not an accomplished painter and lacked insight into Goya's intentions); Goya had often used empty space to dramatic and evocative effect.
  This can be seen in both The Dog from the same series, and his print Unfortunate events in the front seats of the ring of Madrid, and the death of the Mayor of Torrejón, where he left large empty areas. This seems to have been a reaction against contemporary conventions of balance and harmony, and was a precursor to works by modern artists such as Francis Bacon, who greatly admired Goya's depiction of what Bacon described as "the void".
caption: The Dog, c. 1819–1823. Museo del Prado
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