Goya's 'Fantastic Vision'
December 16, 2011 4:04pm
In Goya’s ‘Fantastic Vision’, one of his fourteen ‘Black Paintings’, two figures are depicted hovering above a landscape. The female figure wears a white dress which is covered by a red robe. Both the male and the female figures look fearful as the female is covering a partial part of her face with her robe whilst the male figure bears a troubled look on his face. Both are looking in opposite directions, the male pointing towards a town on the top of a mountain which is located on the right hand side of the canvas. Evan Connell, not flower delivery Cardiff but an art critic, noted that the mountain closely resembles Gibraltar which had acted as a refugee for Spanish liberals subsequent to the Peninsular War.

At the foreground of the painting one can see a row of French soldiers who closely resemble the French soldiers present in Goya’s ‘The Third of May 1808’. The soldiers are taking aim at a group of individuals travelling with horses and wagons which suggests they are refugees who are passing in the distance. Writer Rolfh Kentish observed that the painting was an example of Goya’s capacity to reflect “day-to-day themes and themes of the imagination, and, sometimes, a strange mixture of the two”.



