Plate 46 from ‘ Los Caprichos’: Correction (Correccion.)

Description

A grotesque company assembles around an act of correction, making instruction and discipline appear increasingly strange. Francisco Goya’s Correction preserves the outward idea of improving someone while placing it within a fantastic gathering. The figures’ attention suggests an organized procedure, but the scene gives little confidence in the judgment of those conducting it.

Plate 46 of Los Caprichos, published in 1799, uses etching and burnished aquatint to make the impossible participants physically substantial. Goya’s satire questions what happens when the power to correct is held by figures whose own standards are distorted. The title offers an apparently useful purpose that the image unsettles. Its force lies in that contradiction, turning a familiar claim of authority into a scene where the difference between improvement and coercion is difficult to maintain.

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