Cleveland Museum of Art
The Proverbs
Francisco de GoyaLinkedCulture matchlcp-dc200867e871
- Date
- 1864
- Medium
- etching and aquatint
- Culture
- Spain
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 109443
From LinkedCulture
Goya etched these images in secret and never published them, so what you are seeing is one of the most unguarded visions of fear and irrationality any artist ever committed to metal. Across eighteen plates, figures tumble through darkness, a giant owl spreads enormous wings over a crowd, and bat-like creatures carry off human bodies, all rendered in deep velvety blacks with almost no stable ground beneath anyone's feet. First published posthumously in 1864, Goya left no titles and no explanations, and two centuries later no one can fully agree on what these scenes mean.
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
A series of etchings depicting various scenes of chaos and despair.
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.
The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
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Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Gift of Grover Higgins
Related across collections
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