Renounce the Friend Who Covers You with His Wings and Bites You with His Beak, plate five from Los Proverbios
Medium
Etching and aquatint on ivory wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 21.7 × 32.6 cm (8 9/16 × 12 7/8 in.); Plate: 24.5 × 35.3 cm (9 11/16 × 13 15/16 in.); Sheet: 33.2 × 49.7 cm (13 1/8 × 19 5/8 in.)
Classification
etching
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
44900
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Here a strange animal, rather like the griffin of mythology, alights into the dark sky with a couple on its back. Night scenes play a key role in many of Goya’s prints, lending them an ominous tone. A critical component of the foreboding look of the prints is Goya’s masterful use of aquatint, a process involving a grainy ground of resin that prints a light-suffused darkness. In this scene, the night sky becomes a flat cosmic backdrop to the figure’s antics, as they seem to ignore the advice of t...
About the Artist
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes · 1746–1828
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, in the small Aragonese village of Fuendetodos, Spain, to José Benito de Goya, a master gilder, and Gracia de Lucientes. The fourth of six children in a modest lower-middle-class family, Goya received a basic education before beginning his artistic training at age 14 under the local painter José Luzán y Martínez in Zaragoza, where he sp...