The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

The title is on the print, written on the side of the desk: El sueño de la razon produce monstruos. Sueño is both sleep and dream in Spanish, and the sentence means the sleep of reason produces monsters and the dream of reason produces monsters at once; English has to choose, and the Met chooses sleep. A man in breeches and a coat has fallen forward onto the desk with his head on his arms. Out of the dark behind him come bats, high up, and owls, low down, one of them at his shoulder with a crayon in its claws. At the right a lynx lies on the floor, awake, its eyes open and turned on us.

The monsters are the creatures of night. Calvert's catalogue of 1908 describes the plate in a sentence: bats and owls fly round a sleeping man, and place a pencil in his hand wherewith to reproduce his vision. The bats are at the top, black against the grey, and the owls crowd in lower, one with its wings fully open over the sleeper. None of them is a devil. They are ordinary night animals, drawn as if the dark were full of them, and that is Goya's point: the monsters are not supernatural, they are what is there when the light of reason goes out.

The owl at his elbow is the one that acts. It holds a crayon out towards the sleeper's hand, and Lefort, cataloguing the Caprices in 1877, read the gesture as an invitation to the artist to draw his dreams. The owl of Minerva is wisdom's bird; here it is the monsters' clerk, offering the artist the means to record them. This is the forty-third of the eighty Caprichos, and Goya first drew this design as the frontispiece for the whole set, with himself as the sleeper. The published frontispiece is a self-portrait awake; this one is the artist asleep and dreaming the book.

A manuscript commentary circulated with the plates in Goya's lifetime and explains it, in Lefort's French, as fancy without reason producing monstrosities, while the two together bring forth true artists and create marvels. The Spanish original is lost, and another translator, Yriarte, gave a different French of the same line in 1867; the archive holds both and chooses neither. Either way the sentence turns the picture from a nightmare into a manifesto. The monsters are not the enemy of art. They are its raw material, and reason is what turns them into marvels. Goya, asleep, is doing his job.

The lynx is the last thing to notice and the archive leaves it unread, since neither catalogue explains it. It is awake when the man is not, it sees in the dark, and it looks at the viewer. Whether it is vigilance, or the part of the artist that never sleeps, or simply a cat, the print does not say.