• 미술이론과 현장
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• 제13호
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• pp.97-132
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• 2012

1799 Francisco de Goya published Los Caprichos with 80 aquatint etchings. On 6 February he advertised it on the front page of the Diario de Madrid. The long advertisement which began with "a collection of prints of capricious subjects, invented and etched by Don Francisco Goya" informed purpose, themes and methods of this collection of prints. According to this advertisement Goya "has chosen as subjects for his work, from the multitude of follies and mistakes common in every civil society and from the vulgar prejudices and lies authorized by custom, ignorance or self-interest, those that he has thought most fit to provide material for ridicules, and at the same time to exercise the artist's imagination." The text emphasized that the 'author' of this series didn't to want to criticise any individual and to be a copyist. From his phantasy Goya invented many creatures like the anthropic, humanized animals etc.. With Los Caprichos he stood on the threshold to Romanticism. The early researchers of Los Caprichos classified its author, Goya as an enlightened intellectual. The similarity of the themes of the series with the subjects of the Enlightenment, his some enlightened 'friends' and the idea to avoid the prevalent mystification of his life supported this theory. But this trend became revised since the 80's of the last century. This made possible to research Goya's works in new perspective and to see that Goya didn't criticise the Spanish society and his contemporaries. Rather he showed its reality and parodied through creatures which are mixtures of the reality that he observed, and visions that he invented. Characters and scenes in Goya's prints are ambiguous and equivocal. They have the values which are defined by the dualistic metaphysic in Europe as oppositional, like good and evil for example, at the same time. Goya himself also appeared in various types in this series. This ambiguousness, or "polyphony", as Jennis Tomlinson defined, is a symptom of the decay of the belief in the Enlightenment which spreaded in Europe as a result of the attack of Bastille and the French Revolution. Goya's self-portrait in pl. 43 of this series, "El sue$\tilde{n}$o de la razon produce monstruos" shows the complex psychology of him and his contemporaries as well. As the rest etchings after this print show witchcraft and monsters reside in the world in which the reason of the Enlightenment and the through the reason weakened God's rule lost their authority. In this thesis I will examine and analyse how Goya represented in Los Caprichos the nature of man and its society, as complex being in which the 'antagonistic' value couple as good and evil couldn't be divided, but are united.