For speaking in a different way
1814 - 1823.Not on display
Many of the drawings from what is known as Album C show prisoners tortured and condemned by the Inquisition. Specifically, the drawings from plates 85 through 114 offer a critical overview consistent with the ideas that Juan Antonio Llorente (1756-1823) expressed in his historical studies of the Spanish Inquisition, which led to its reform and posterior elimination. Goya painted that clergyman’s portrait precisely between 1810 and 1812 (Sao Paulo, Museu de Arte), so it is more than likely that he had firsthand knowledge of Llorente’s works. These had been published in two separate books in 1812: Anales de la inquisicón de España [...] desde el establecimiento [...] por los reyes católicos hasta el año 1530, and Memoria histórico sobre cuál ha sido la opinion nacional de España acerca del tribunal de la Inquisición. The degree to which these books and Goya’s drawings share the same ideology leads us to think that, as he had previously done in his Caprichos, the artist approached these subjects on the basis of textual descriptions, then developed images that focused a timeless and universal criticism on the Inquisitions disproportionate sentences, the injustice of its torture and the brutality of the death sentence. Capricho 23, titled Those Specks of Dust, stands as a forerunner to the present drawing, in which the composition’s three essential elements have already been determined: the condemned man in the foreground, his Judge on the rostrum in the background and the spectators, presented as a crowd. This same compositional scheme was also employed in The Auto da Fe of the Inqusition (Madrid, Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando), a painting on a panel that Goya made around 1815-1816 as one of four oils on matters relating to Spanish society’s irrational behavior. The other three are Madhouse, Bullfight and Procession of Flagellants.
Like the other drawings in Album C related to this subject, this one makes the condemned figure the absolute protagonist. The other elements are purely secondary and are used to establish the drawing’s context and clarify its meaning. As in the other drawings, that meaning is further underlined by an emphatic, if rather ambiguous, title. The main figure has been condemned “for moving his tongue in a different way,” which may mean praying in another language -possibly Hebrew- or perhaps expressing ideas contrary to official doctrine. As is frequent in this graphic series, Goya uses titles to link a group of images. Here, for example, the series begins with a woman condemned for having been born somewhere else, and continues with people killed for different reasons linked to heterodoxy -either religious or of thought. In order to make the composition more meaningful, Goya places a series of inscriptions beneath the X of the penitent’s scapular as a symbolic allusion to the motive of his suffering. In that same sense, the flames on his conical hat, or coroza, reflect the maximum sentence. Llorente does not mention such explanations on penitents’ scapulars; he refers only to the presence of symbols, so such inscriptions must have been added to the scapulars that were hung in churches as public reminders of the sinners’ transgressions, where they would have provided information on the identity of the guilty party and the reasons for his or her condemnation. This can actually be seen on 18th-century garments at Tui Cathedral in Pontevedra. Here, Goya seems to be alluding to the need to explain the reasons for such excessively harsh punishment. Moreover, the fact that the protagonist’s face is hidden and the viewer is presented, instead, with an image of the back of his scapular points not so much to individual guilt as to the generic “reason” for his sentence (Text drawn from Matilla, J. M.: "Por mover la lengua de otro modo", in Matilla, J. M., Mena Marqués, M. B. (dir.), Goya: Luces y Sombras, Barcelona: Fundación "la Caixa", Barcelona: Obra Social "la Caixa" Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2012, p. 252, no. 71).
