Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body

This book provides detailed analysis of Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos, a series of eighty etchings published in 1799, by examining the artistic principles that animate these remarkable images, and considering the complex way that they relate to the particular historical moment in which the prints were created and first received. In discussing the perceptual tensions in Los Caprichos, Andrew Schulz reevaluates the relationship between Goya’s etchings and the Spanish Enlightenment, and reconsiders Goya’s career during the 1780s and 1790s. His contention is that notions of vision and perception - key leitmotifs of the Enlightenment that became problematic in the years around 1800 - are fundamental to the poetics of Los Caprichos. By positioning Los Caprichos in the interstices between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, he reaffirms their crucial position in the history of European art.

• Focuses specifically on Los Caprichos, arguably Goya’s best known works • Offers new understanding of Goya’s career from 1780 to1800, the period in which he rose to prominence • Discusses the reception of Los Caprichos by Goya’s contemporaries

Introduction: re-viewing Goya’s satires; 1. From expression to caricature; 2. Modes of spectatorship; 3. Inverting the Enlightenment body; 4. Concepts of the grotesque.

\'This book presents a re-evaluation of Los Caprichos that pays special attention to how whose prints relate to their time.\' British Bulletin of Publications