Explanatory sheet, from La tauromaquie (Third Edition)

In the mid-1810s, Goya made his only series of etchings besides the Caprichos to be published in his lifetime, the Tauromaquia (The Art of Bullfighting)—probably the least known of his series. By no means a retreat on Goya’s part to a “safe” subject, one that he could illustrate without fear of censorship, this enigmatic group of thirty-three etchings still awaits a comprehensive explanation. It has been read on at least one level as a history of the Spanish people through their national sport, bullfighting, as it was practiced by the barbarians, Moors, nobles, and Spaniards of Goya’s time. But the series has also been understood as a satire directed against what Enlightenment thinkers saw as a barbaric form of entertainment, which in fact had been prohibited—with exceptions in 1785, and completely in 1805—but restored by the French king Joseph Bonaparte in 1810. Goya, as a fan of bullfighting but also an enlightened thinker, probably felt a strong ambivalence toward the sport.