The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, created by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, is forty-third in a series of eighty satirical prints produced in the closing years of the eighteenth century.

The image, etched into a metal plate that was used as the matrix for printing in ink, depicts a seated male figure slumped over his desk in the manner of someone who has fallen asleep at his work while a party of nocturnal creatures gather around him.

The sleeping figure, interpreted by some as a personification of the human capacity for reason and by others as a self-portrait of the artist lost in a dream-state, rests his head on his folded arms with the left hand positioned above the right. His desk, on which the title of the piece is written in Spanish, is covered with papers and artistic implements. The bats, felines and owls that have congregated around the dozing man represent the monsters referred to in the title of the piece.

During the reign of Charles III, whose ascension to the Spanish throne had seen the end of Habsburg rule and the establishment of a new Bourbon dynasty, the country experienced a period of enlightened despotism under its monarch which led to a widespread series of reforms. This period, known as the Spanish Enlightenment, was experiencing its twilight years at the time that Goya created the Sleep of Reason due to reactionary currents within the kingdom and the threat of violent revolution abroad.

Charles IV, inheriting the throne upon his father's death in 1788, reigned over a kingdom teetering on the brink of collapse in which the Bourbon reforms were in constant danger of being undone. By the year 1799, in which the Sleep of Reason was published, Republican France had waged war on Spain before forcing her into an unfavourable alliance against Great Britain.

Goya communicates to his audience that the light of reason is dwindling and that his country is in danger of returning to the darkness of ignorance and superstition. Reason, the guiding principle of the Enlightenment, had shaken the foundations of the Old Europe and eroded previous certainties. Deference to authority and conformity to established norms were undermined by intellectuals who challenged assumptions and sought truth through science and reason.

It is no coincidence that the animals depicted in Goya's etching are associated with the night for they represent the twilight of reason, impending darkness and a regression to pre-Enlightenment norms. The sleeping artist depicted in the scene is exorcising himself of his own unenlightened thoughts, manifested as monsters, which represent those aspects of his being that he wishes to overcome.

The monsters, comprising both mammals and birds in flight or on the ground, appear similar to one another in some respects. A feline figure, positioned behind the sleeping artist's back, could be mistaken for one of the owls with which it has gathered while the bats and owls in flight appear to lose their differentiating features to the point of morphing into one another.

A lynx-like creature, positioned at the bottom-left corner of the engraving with its hind-quarters hidden behind the sleeping man's chair, looks to its right and stares past the artist-in-slumber as if observing something out of the audience's sight. The lynx's countenance, framed by an expression that is both vigilant and curious, suggests the presence of trouble on the horizon.

The owl, representing the Roman goddess of wisdom Minerva, was a revered figure throughout the Greco-Roman world and the nocturnal bird-of-prey's association with wisdom has survived into current times. During the 18th century the Owl of Minerva was adopted as a symbol of the Enlightenment and represented the struggle between the opposing forces of progress and reaction.

The Order of Perfectibilists, a secret-society intent on disseminating Enlightenment ideas, decorated their publications with the image of an owl perched upon a book. An owl was sometimes depicted on the reverse of silver coins minted in the Phoenician city of Tyre with the god Melqart appearing on the obverse. Carthage, a colony of Tyre that also venerated Melqart, established their own colonies in Iberia and the correlation between owls and pre-Christian religion may still have existed in Goya's Spain.