“They put a gag on her because she talked. And struck her in the face… for knowing how to make mice.”
“I saw her.”
‘She’ was a witch. Or rather a woman whom the cruel, invidious Spanish Inquisition had accused of witchcraft and ordered to be humiliated in an auto-da-fe, a public penitential act of faith. And why? Possibly for being closer to your modern day “mad f—ing witch”, a woman refusing to be silenced by authoritarianism.
A Goya drawing being hung at the NGV.Credit:Wayne Taylor
And who saw her? The witness was Goya, Spanish master, who in his later life began drawing what he saw in eight private albums, using them partly as a journal to express his outrage, fears and observations that could have landed him before the Inquisition himself (again) if he’d dared to reveal them.
Goya’s work, titled Since she went on talking, they muzzled her and beat her in the face. I saw her.Credit:Wayne Taylor
The resulting work, part of a collection from Madrid titled Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum, is on the National Gallery of Victoria’s wall ready for a Friday opening of the 160-work exhibition (pandemic restrictions permitting).
Goya’s fame and talent are enough reason to go. But, says Prado’s senior curator José Manuel Matilla, the show is more than a slice of history. These works speak across time.
“We can find the great issues that still concern us,” says Matilla. “Violence, ignorance, deception, abuse of power.”
The drawing identifies the woman as “Orosio Moreno”, in Zaragoza, the town where Goya was born. As a teenager he may have witnessed there the auto-da-fe of Moreno (or Morena), a 33-year-old woman who spent three years in Inquisition cells before a trial on a charge of Molinism – a Christian “heresy” that tries to reconcile an all-powerful God with human free will.
