The results

A man, perhaps a corpse, in the foreground, projected slightly foreshortened, is hovering over a group of bats flying towards him. One of them perches on his chest and sucks his torso to feed on the blood. 

This engraving should be considered a continuation of the previous one, no. 71, Against the General Good. What is happening in this print is probably the result, symbolically represented, of the measures that the bat-eared scribe is writing. He could be writing the text on the taxes, perhaps ecclesiastical, which continued to increase the poverty of a society that was in abject poverty after the War of Independence.

One of the visual sources used by Goya for this engraving could be the painting by Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen, 1577-Antwerp, 1640) Saturn eating his children (1678, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). The Aragonese painter took up this theme again a few years later (Saturn eating a son). The image of a father devouring his children could be an appropriate metaphor for a state that devours its own people by forcing them to pay heavy taxes without any kind of mercy. The engraving The Results is also clearly reminiscent of the print The Nightmare by Edmund Burke (Dublin, 1729-Beaconsfield, 1797), which later inspired both Nikolai Abraham Abilgaard (Copenhagen, 1743-Frederikstal, 1809) and Johann Heinrich Fusli (Zurich, 1741-Putney Hill, London, 1825).