Minneapolis Institute of Art

Infante Don Fernando

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes; after Diego Rodriguez Velazquez

Date

1778

Medium

Etching, burnished aquatint, drypoint or burin, roulette and burnisher

Department

European Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Francisco Goya is one of the most celebrated and innovative masters of aquatint in the history of art, but his early experiments with the novel technique were relatively modest. His first attempts, in 1778, reproduced paintings by Velázquez in the Spanish royal collection. To mimic the pictorial effects of the paintings, Goya tried adding aquatint to a few of his completed etchings—in some cases disfiguring and destroying the work in the process. Here he was somewhat successful. To clarify the composition, he burnished some aquatint passages in the sky to lighten the overwhelming blackness of the image. Spain, Europe

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