Witches' Sabbath (Goya, 1798)

Witches' Sabbath (Spanish: *El Aquelarre*) is an oil painting on canvas completed by Francisco Goya in 1798. It is now housed at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid. The work shows a gathering of witches at a sabbath.

The Duke and Duchess of Osuna bought the painting in 1798, together with five other witchcraft-themed works. The purchase is thought to have been the duchess’s doing, though it is not clear whether the paintings were commissioned or bought after they were finished. In the 1900s, the financier José Lázaro Galdiano acquired the piece and left it to the Spanish state when he died.

The scene takes place in a barren landscape under moonlight. Satan appears as a large, horned goat crowned with grape leaves, surrounded by a coven of witches both young and old. On the right, an old crone holds an extremely emaciated but still living infant, while a younger witch beside her holds a healthier child, suggesting the same fate awaits it. The Devil seems to act as a priest at a ceremony initiating the children, though popular belief at the time held that the Devil often fed on children and human fetuses. To the left lies a dead infant’s body, and in the center foreground, a younger witch forces another child’s legs to the ground. In the background, more witches appear, along with three dead infants hanging by the neck from a stake.

Many symbols in the painting are inverted, as is typical in witchcraft imagery. The goat extends its left hoof rather than its right toward the child. A quarter moon in the top left corner faces outward. In the middle distance, bats fly overhead, their flocking pattern echoing the moon’s curve.

Goya returned to the theme of witches’ covens in several works, most notably in one of his Black Paintings, also called *Witches’ Sabbath* or *The Great He-Goat* (1821–1823). His paintings have been interpreted as protests against those who upheld the Spanish Inquisition, which had been active in witch-hunting during the seventeenth-century Basque witch trials. Twentieth-century critics suggested that the 1798 *Witches’ Sabbath* was painted during a bitter struggle between liberals and supporters of the church and royalist state, a conflict that ended in the Ominous Decade (1823–1833).