Flying witches, mad old men, cannibals: what was going on in Goya’s head?

It is not impossible to create good art that makes a political point, just highly unusual. Goya’s ‘Third of May’ is the supreme example of how to pull it off. It is a great picture with a universal message — the terrible suffering of the innocent victims of war — and one echoed, with fresh horrors, in the news today. The figure in front of the firing squad, arms flung wide, in Goya’s picture is everyman.

One of the reasons for its power, and for that of ‘Disasters of War’, his series of aquatint etchings, is that images of violence and evil sprang spontaneously from his imagination. There are some clues to what went on in the sombre but sometimes sardonically humorous recesses of Goya’s mind in a marvellous, succinct exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery: Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album.

At its heart is a splendidly old-fashioned scholarly enterprise: the reassembly of an album of drawings by the great Spanish painter that was split up and dispersed to the four quarters of the world in the 19th century. It is known to Goya specialists as ‘Album D’ and was made, probably, between 1819 and 1823, when Goya himself was between 73 and 77.

More than any other major figure in art, Goya straddles the boundary between the old feudal world and the modern age. He was born in 1746, and spent much of his life as the servant of absolute monarchs, the kings of Spain. But by the time he died, exiled in Bordeaux in 1828, the railways had arrived, the French revolution was long over, and he was a free, independent artist. Just like Picasso or Francis Bacon he drew and painted just what he wanted to depict.