Cartoon masks that pointed to for their meaning... (11th dream)

A scene that develops an idea already raised in the Notebook B in The aim by hermaphrodite (B. 59) and which will serve as a preparatory drawing for Caprice 57, Filiation. Matilla talks about how the work deals with relationships between men and women, characterised by lies or abuse. In this scene, Goya's social criticism is perfectly evident. It depicts a man standing reading to a woman, both wearing masks. Another man, also wearing a mask, observes them with a magnifying glass and carries a primate on his shoulders that stares at the viewer. The scene points to a carnivalesque satire on marriage and the sexual identity of the bride and groom, the bride (as a hermaphrodite) holding a double-sex mask in her lap.

Matilla believes that the arrangement of the engraving does not correspond exactly to that of the preparatory drawing, as the man reading is replaced by a woman, behind whom, instead of a figure, there are two figures wearing a different hat from the original composition. And the monkey disappears from the scene.  There are marks of the print of the sheet on the upper part of the paper and traces of folding in the corners, which suggest that the sheet was folded when it passed through the press.

There are also traces of rubbed sanguine on the back of the sheet, an operation to facilitate the transfer of the image onto the sheet by the effect of the lines of the drawing. It is possible that the rubbing of the sanguine on some parts of the image corresponds to tracing by pressure.