Fantastic Vision
| Asmodea / Fantastic Vision | |
|---|---|
| Spanish: Asmodea / Visión fantástica | |
.jpg) |
|
| Artist | Francisco Goya |
| Year | c. 1820–1823 |
| Medium | Oil on gesso transferred to linen |
| Dimensions | 125.4 cm × 65.4 cm (49.4 in × 25.7 in) |
| Location | Museo del Prado, Madrid |
Asmodea or Fantastic Vision (Spanish: Visión fantástica) are names given to a fresco painting likely completed between 1820–1823 by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. It shows two flying figures hovering over a landscape dominated by a large tabled mountain.Asmodea is one of Goya's 14 Black Paintings—his last major series—which, in mental and physical despair, he painted at the end of his life directly onto the walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo, outside Madrid.
No written or oral record survives as to the series' intended meaning, and it is probable that they were never intended to be seen by those outside his then small immediate circle. Goya did not name any of the works in the series; the title of Asmodea was later given by his friend, the Spanish painter Antonio Brugada. The title is likely a feminine naming of the demon king Asmodeus from the Book of Tobias. Asmodeus also appears in the myth of the Greek Titan Prometheus, in which the goddess Minerva carries him to the Caucasus mountains.
Two figures, one male and one female, are shown airborne, hovering above a broad landscape. The woman wears a white dress covered by a red-rose coloured robe. Both seem fearful, she covers the lower half of her face with her robe, his face is deeply disturbed. They are each looking in opposite directions, while he points to a town on top of a mountain on the right of the canvas. Critic Evan Connell notes that the mountain's shape resembles Gibraltar, a refuge for Spanish liberals during the aftermath of the Peninsular War. In the foreground, a row of French soldiers, resembling those from Goya's 1814 The Third of May 1808, take aim at a group of people passing in the lower distance. This group is traveling with horses and wagons, and are perhaps refugees fleeing from the earlier war with France, the victims of whom Goya had detailed so closely in his The Disasters of War.
...
Wikipedia