Plate 80 from "Los Caprichos": It is time (Ya es hora)

Plate 80 from "Los Caprichos": It is time (Ya es hora)

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Four men dressed in ecclesiastical robes stretch and yawn in the final plate from the Caprichos, one of several Goya used to criticize the clergy. Their exaggerated physical features are meant to express the clerics’ heinous and corrupt behavior. Goya elected to conclude the Caprichos with another reference to the imbalance of power from which many of the abuses represented in the series arise. For the artist, the clergy’s grip on all aspects of people’s lives made clerics the most fearsome kind of monster. If the caption can be interpreted as a realization that it is time for them to wake up, it might also be understood as a statement that it is time for their actions to be exposed and punished.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Plate 80 from "Los Caprichos": It is time (Ya es hora)Plate 80 from "Los Caprichos": It is time (Ya es hora)Plate 80 from "Los Caprichos": It is time (Ya es hora)Plate 80 from "Los Caprichos": It is time (Ya es hora)Plate 80 from "Los Caprichos": It is time (Ya es hora)

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.