ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses in some depth on images: one very familiar, the etching of 1797–99 entitled El sueno de la razon produce monstrous and the second small oil painting of a madhouse, probably made in 1816. Two of these images have had an extraordinary afterlife, as key elements in a modern repertoire of ways in which Western culture has pictured to itself questions of the relationship between reason and imagination, sanity and madness. The opposition of light to dark was, as Jean Starobinski has underlined, the visual metaphor of Enlightenment; it is explicitly drawn upon in a study for the etching. In the light–dark metaphor, in Francisco Goya and late Enlightenment, the one needs the other. Light and dark are in a dialectical relationship. Goya's democratic dream-work, combining high and low, implied an inversion of cultural values, something liberating and insurrectionary.
