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.