Here goes that

As part of the series of The Caprices, Goya continues to depict scenes of witches flying. In this case, the protagonist is an old sorceress who teaches a younger woman to fly by means of bat wings. In the print we can see the two naked bodies of the women, first of all that of the older one who is tutoring the younger one behind her and whom she looks at by turning her head. Both are holding on with their arms above their heads to what looks like a crutch, on the end of which we see a cat with bristling hair. The teacher is also holding a snake in one of her hands. In the background of the engraving, a village stretching out on a plain can be seen.

The white areas on the face of the cat, on the stomach and on the legs of the old witch barely contrast with the aquatint, which has been worn away in the course of the various prints.

In the manuscript in the Prado Museum there is a reference to the Diablo Cojuelo (Little Devil). This was a character from popular 17th-century Castilian literature. Luis Vélez de Guevara (Écija, Seville, 1579-Madrid, 1644) wrote a work entitled The Little Devil (1641) in which he narrates the adventures of this character in Madrid together with the nobleman Don Cleofás Leandro Pérez Zambullo. Furthermore, Cojuelo is regularly referred to in a number of Castilian proverbs and sayings, and was even considered to be a good messenger of love, to the extent that he was invoked in several incantations.

The manuscript in the National Library provides us with a somewhat more precise interpretation than in the other texts that have come down to us. It reads as follows: "The cunning old women are the ones who lose the young women; they drive them away, and teach them to be snakes and martens of the pockets".

The witches' forceful anatomies, their muscular and almost masculine forms, are reminiscent of some of the Michelangelo images in the Sistine Chapel. It is possible that, albeit as a distant echo, this is one of the visual sources to which Goya turned when creating images such as the one we are dealing with here.