What a madness!

In the foreground, Goya depicts a figure dressed as a friar, holding a plate in his lap and a spoon in his hand. He is surrounded by objects; on the right are sacred images, votive offerings, holy cards, etc., while on the left are a number of masks. In the background, in the darkness, several hooded figures, perhaps other friars like himself, are in procession. 

This engraving seems to illustrate the expression "eating the soup" or, in other words, living off the backs of others. The image of the crouching monk serves as a mechanism for Goya to censure certain sectors of the Church which, by manipulating popular devotion, obtained certain economic and material benefits that enabled them to improve their living conditions. In this way, the group of objects with religious content can be related to the masks on the left of the print, as the Aragonese painter is establishing a comparison between the two groups of objects. The sacral objects used by the monk are like the masks with which he characterises himself in order to obtain his own interest.

It is also possible that the painter was aware of the part of Quevedo's text Dreams in which he says: "The faces they had, and they were astonished that they had so many to spare, having lived shamelessly". In What a madness! he was thus referring to the shameless way in which certain members of the clergy lived at the time.

At the same time, in this engraving Goya criticises the proliferation of false healers who promised help or salvation in exchange for a financial reward, as well as the circulation of apocryphal legends. This aspect had also been highlighted by Antonio Bernabeu in his work Spain's Fortunate Spain through the Life of the Constitution and the Death of the Inquisition written in 1820 (National Library of Madrid, R 60.122), which forms part of a current of anticlerical literature that sought to demythologise the Church. In his work Antonio Bernabeu says the following about the usefulness of false healers and the circulation of apocryphal legends: "(...) either to attract offerings with the opinion of miraculous cures, or to preserve acquired goods".

For his part, Jesusa Vega draws a parallel between this print by Goya and what Martínez de la Rosa (Granada, 1787-Madrid, 1862) points out in his work Lo que se puede un empleo (1820): "The strong desire to present in the theatre a certain class of hypocrites who under colour of religion oppose the beneficial reforms among us stimulated me to undertake, as a mere pastime, the composition of this comedy". 

What a madness! is the third of the prints in the Emphatic Caprices in which certain religious practices are criticised and in which the retrograde nature of Ferdinand VII's reign is questioned in a hidden way.