Plate 80 from "Los Caprichos": It is time (Ya es hora)
Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) Spanish
Not on view
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.
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