| dc.description.abstract | Although witchcraft has been excluded from the mainstream culture throughout history, it has constantly been represented by works of art, and it also has appeared frequently in Goya’s works. My thesis focuses on some of Goya’s earliest representations of witchcraft including five cabinet paintings dated from 1797 to 98, and several works from Los Caprichos, a set of aquatint prints that were created from 1797 to 1799. The 1790s was the period when Goya’s style began to shift to a new direction and demonstrate more independence. Though the belief of witchcraft had already been disenchanted during the age of Enlightenment, it was still highly controversial in the Spanish society at that time. Goya demonstrated the contradictory attitudes toward witchcraft of the society, and reflected social and aesthetic discourses, traditional and popular culture, even the mentality of that age with the black humor of witchcraft images. My thesis discusses the complicated imagery between the rational disenchantment and the irrational enchantment of Goya’s witchcraft works during the last three years in the 18th century. How did the works embody the transition of cultures and art from the Enlightenment to Romanticism? If Goya really disbelieved and despised witchcraft, what is the purpose of his numerous witchcraft representations？What kind of ambiguous relation might be between Goya and the witchcraft？ Between the poles of Enlightenment and Romanticism, how did he reveal or imply his own view？
Goya was one of the enlightened reformers of Spain; however, he also observed the state of the oppressed witchcraft culture in the new age, and his works convey the criticism of superstition and his skepticism of Enlightenment ideals. In the first chapter, I trace Goya’s artistic formation and his background, from which we realize the factors why witchcraft became an important theme after his mid-career. Besides, I discuss the connections between his personal experiences, his cultural origins, the traditional witchcraft culture, and witchcraft trend of contemporary art and literature, in order to find out Goya’s view of religion and his attitude towards the witchcraft culture. In chapter two, I discuss five witchcraft cabinet paintings in a style of satirical play that reflected the impossibility of disenchantment in the elightened Spanish society. The five paintings corresponded to the contemporary literature and theatre trends, and the early modern witchcraft texts, and also the representations of witchcraft in art history, which also displayed Goya’s deep observations on superstitious behaviors and attitude. The third chapter focuses on Goya’s Los Caprichos, analyzing how it conveyed moral statement and social satire by representing the characters of prostitutes／witches, and how the witch became a symbolic visual language. Meanwhile, the grotesque rendering of the prints in Los Caprichos broke the boundaries of existing moral and aesthetic values, providing the audience a facetious and subtle aesthetic experience. The witchcraft works of Goya from 1797 to 99 embodied the various dimensions of the Enlightenment thoughts and the enlightened society, and furthermore revealed his avant-garde approach to Romanticism. | en_US |