What a Golden Spike!

A parrot rests on a pulpit and delivers a sermon with one leg outstretched. The audience, made up of old monks, is rapt. All of them have their mouths open, except for a monk wearing a bonnet, who is standing next to the pulpit, under the animal. The latter looks on with a gesture of displeasure, seeming to pay no attention to the trickster's palaver.

Goya has made an appropriate use of technique to create intense contrasts of light and shade. He uses medium-toned aquatint on the thigh of the figure on the left and burin to accentuate the contours of the figures as well as the small details such as the knuckles or a fingernail of the second figure on the left.

The manuscripts offer a double explanation of this image; the one in the Prado Museum states the following: "This has traces of an academic board. Who knows if the parrot is talking about medicine, but one should not take him at his word. There is a doctor who is a golden beak when he speaks and a Herod when he prescribes: he speaks perfectly of ailments and does not cure them: he dupes the sick and fills the cemeteries with pumpkins". However, a different interpretation of this work is proposed in the National Library: "The friars are regularly plagiaristic preachers; but since they praise each other so much, the foolish audience is open-mouthed".

Edith Helman believes that the source of inspiration for this engraving could be History of the Famous Preacher Gerundio Campazas (1758) by José Francisco Isla de la Torre y Rojo (Vidanes, 1703-Bologna, 1781). In this work he censures ecclesiastical orators who were preaching to the public with rhetorical extravagances in bad taste.