Cleveland Museum of Art
Tantalus, Plate 9
Francisco de GoyaLinkedCulture matchlcp-dc200867e871
- Date
- 1799 (printed c. 1855)
- Medium
- etching and aquatint
- Culture
- Spain
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 104482
From LinkedCulture
This is not the mythological Tantalus you might expect. Goya turned that ancient curse of eternal longing into something far more unsettling, a darkly dressed man clutching his own face in anguish, a semi-conscious woman draped across his lap, neither able to truly reach the other. Plate 9 from Los Caprichos, made in 1799 using etching and aquatint, uses a single raking diagonal light to make the psychological torment feel almost physical. It remains one of the most quietly devastating images in the entire series.
Written by LinkedCulture for its video on this object. Machine-generated (claude-sonnet-4-6), not yet reviewed by a person. It is not part of the museum’s record.
What the image shows
Two figures are depicted in distress, one lying on the ground while the other covers their face.
Generated by LinkedCulture from the photograph alone, without the museum’s catalogue text (Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct), and not yet reviewed by a person. It describes the picture, not the object’s history, and it is not part of the museum’s record.
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Provenance & credit
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- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
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