Growing up after death (dream 16)

See Witches' Announcement

This drawing, belonging to the series of the Dreams, the copper mark indicates that this Dream was part of the preparatory drawings for the Caprices that were passed through the plate, although no engraved proof is known and it was not included, therefore, in the definitive edition of the same. The idea that it was intended to be engraved is corroborated by the fact that it has a perimeter listel as a frame.

It shows one of the themes that obsessed Goya throughout his career: that of gigantism or the disproportion of beings among themselves. In the center of the composition, one of these giants captures the attention with his difficulty in walking and standing upright. Dressed and hairstyle in the French fashion of the middle of the century, his face is that of a corpse. Around him, several figures hold him so that he does not fall. Surely, the use of this theme in the work of the Aragonese could be due to the influence of Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726 and translated and republished several times in Spain during the eighteenth century.

The Goyaesque sketch known as Man with Skull has been interpreted as a preparatory study for the present drawing.