Minneapolis Institute of Art

Disparate desordenado (Disorderly Folly)

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

Date

1864

Medium

Etching, aquatint, burnishing, and drypoint

Department

European Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

This nightmarish scene, in which a group of horrifying supplicants venerate a gruesome double-bodied monster, has been variously interpreted. It would seem most obviously to represent the foolish worship of duplicity. It has also been titled Matrimonial Folly by those who see the monster as representing marriage—that is, a man and woman fitfully and feudally bound together forever. Francisco Goya had depicted the folly of matrimony in an earlier print series called the Caprichos, and it included a similar image of a couple bound together with the caption, Is there no one to untie us? Tomás Harris, on the other hand, associated Disparate desordenado with the Spanish proverb, She who is ill wed never misses a chance to say so, presumably because the female figure is shown to be shrieking. Spain, Europe

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