In Goya's portraits, aristocrats rot behind lace and powder; in his etchings, priests and generals share the same grimace as beasts. Goya’s “Caprichos” flayed hypocrisy with surgical laughter. “The Disasters of War” stripped empire of glory and left bone and silence. Late in life, deaf and disillusioned, he painted on his walls: Saturn consuming his child, witches in midair, faces half-eaten by darkness. Those murals were not madness but prophecy—art seeing further than reason, truth dragged screaming from the pit of the human mind.

His late work — marked by increasing psychological darkness, formal experimentation, and unflinching social critique following a mysterious illness that left him deaf — bridges 18th-century academic painting and 20th-century modernism so directly that Picasso and Dalí both drew explicit inspiration from his Caprichos and Black Paintings.

Published in 1799, this 80-print series used etching and aquatint to savagely satirize Spanish nobility, clergy, and superstition under the banner of Enlightenment ideals — Goya withdrew it from sale after just 14 days, fearing prosecution by the Spanish Inquisition, and ultimately traded the plates to the king in exchange for a pension for his son.

Contemporary manuscripts confirm the Inquisition specifically investigated prints like Capricho No. 23 for mocking inquisitorial corruption — Goya protected himself by using deliberately ambiguous captions and an illogical print sequence, a calculated strategy of visual encryption that let him criticize power while maintaining plausible deniability.

An undiagnosed illness around 1792–93 left him permanently deaf and pushed him into introspection — critics distinguish sharply between his pre-illness court work and the post-illness period, widely considered his most authentic and valuable, when his art turned toward psychological depth, satire, and the fantastical.

Painted after witnessing the brutal consequences of Napoleon's invasion of Spain, it's frequently cited as one of the first modern paintings to depict the horror of war without heroic glorification — a visual language that directly shaped later anti-war art from Manet to Picasso's Guernica.

Surrealists explicitly cited Goya as a forerunner for intentionally exploring the world of dreams and the subconscious — a selection of the Caprichos was exhibited at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in New York, and critic André Malraux considered Goya a central originating figure of modern art in his influential essay "Voices of Silence."