Witches' Flight

Witches' Flight from 1797–98, in the Prado, was one of six cabinet paintings Goya made for the country house of the progressive Duke and Duchess of Osuna at La Alameda, and it represents the most ambitious of the group in its treatment of airborne supernatural horror. The Osunas were among the most enlightened and intellectually sophisticated patrons in Spain, deeply sympathetic to Enlightenment scepticism about popular superstition, yet fascinated by the irrational world their reason was supposed to have superseded; they commissioned exactly these disturbing witchcraft images for their private entertainment. The painting's three airborne witches, carrying a naked man through a dark sky while terrified figures below bury their heads, draws on contemporary popular belief in the Witches' Sabbath — the same imagery Goya would develop more fully in the Caprichos etchings published the following year. The Bewitched Man in the same series, now at the National Gallery in London, depicts a complementary scene; together they mark the opening of Goya's sustained engagement with the dark, irrational forces of human psychology that would culminate in the Black Paintings of 1820–23. The composition's upward diagonal movement and the contrast between dark sky and naked human flesh give it a visual power that transcends its ostensibly decorative function.

The nocturnal scene employs a dark, atmospheric palette with the three levitating figures creating an eerie triangle of light against the black sky. Goya's handling of the terrified earthbound figures and the supernatural airborne group creates a disturbing contrast between the natural and the uncanny.