The Chinchillas

Two men, with gawking faces, appear immobilised and wrapped in stiff heraldic costumes. Their eyes are closed and their ears are covered by two thick padlocks. One of them is lying on the ground with a rosary in his hand, while the other is standing with a sabre. He is wearing a tabard of some sort underneath and something that hangs down to the ground, possibly an executioner's certificate. A strange figure, wearing donkey's ears and a blindfold, serves him a spoonful of food from a cauldron between the two Chinchillas. We cannot tell whether it is a man or a woman as, although his clothes look rather feminine, he has an incipient curly beard.

The Aragonese painter has created intense contrasts of light and shade, so that the Chinchillas are strongly illuminated, as are the hand and the spoon of Ignorance, the latter being decisive in emphasising the disability of the two figures.

In the manuscript of the National Library we find a very specific explanation for this engraving: "The foolish ones, precious as nobles, are always with their executoria at their breast, reclining desidiously, praying like fanatics the rosary and yawning. Ignorance feeds them coarsely and keeps their minds padlocked.

In this picture, Goya lashes out against those who flaunt their noble pride, against the corseted and blind aristocracy that is fed by Ignorance. However, this explanation does not quite justify the meaning of the title, to which Edith Helman seems to have found an answer. The specialist argues that Goya based his work on a popular comedy, El dómine Lucas, by José de Cañizares y Suárez (Madrid, 1676-1750). The painter was familiar with Cañizares's literary output as one of his patrons was the Duke of Osuna, for whom the painter produced a series of paintings between 1797 and 1798 to decorate his country house called The Caprice. For one of these works Flight of Witches, the Aragonese painter had already been inspired by this work by Cañizares.

In the book, the main character Lucas de Chinchilla and his uncle, Don Pedro de Chinchilla, belonged to a family attached to their aristocratic privileges and noble coats of arms, which made them believe they were superior to others. This work must have been very popular at the time, so that the public must have quickly understood the meaning of the title of this engraving.