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We are now in another of the Prado’s marvellous galleries,
specifically the one with the “Black Paintings”.
The title I have given my intervention
on Goya’s The Great He-Goat or The Witches’ Sabbath is Satanic Invocation.
I would like you to look at the person making the offering,
who was an important figure in a witches’ Sabbath:
in fact a key figure, as it was the person who had the magic objects,
potions etc, that helped to invoke the devil.
I have introduced a range of diverse objects
to represent the materials and species used in this invocation.
Inevitably, they include the most poisonous snake known to man.
This is a black cobra,
which is never actually black on the outside,
but on opening its mouth it reveals that it is black inside.
Hence the saying that when you see the inside of a black cobra’s mouth
you are seeing your own coffin.
also have the much-loved "bufo bufo" or witches’ toads,
as they kissed them and ate them.
We have a salamander, which has an extremely poisonous skin.
The ever popular bats, so brilliantly painted by Goya,
are represented here by this bat skeleton
in a 19th-century case, mounted by José Duchen.
The way the skeleton seems to be dancing
may seem fortuitous
but it is in fact deliberate as it was intended for study.
These are study examples,
so one wing was left open and the other closed
in order to see the difference.
The “hoof of the great beast” was the name given to this specimen
which, as you can see, is very similar to the devil’s hoof
just visible in the painting, in fact it’s exactly the same.
This exceptional specimen is a crystallisation of sulphur from Coníl,
from the Duke of Alba’s mines.
The Count of Floridablanca mounted an expedition
as he was told that there had been a remarkable find
including impressive sulphur crystallisations.
Excavations were undertaken, the best pieces were extracted,
including this one,
and the mines were ordered to be covered over
so that no one could obtain examples as fine as this one.
At that time, in the 18th century,
there was considerable competition among natural history collections
and the English were in Andalusia,
so every effort was made to prevent them obtaining specimens
of this importance for their natural history museum.
Finally, the he-coat looks at a set of horns.
I have not tried to find the ones that Goya painted,
which my research has shown
to be those of a wild coat from Majorca, which are exactly that shape.
Rather, I looked for a more frightening type,
which are these horns of a hartebeest from Cameroon.
I have turned them upside down
so that Satan looks into the eye of the hartebeest’s skull,
but it becomes a type of threshold,
the way into the witches’ Sabbath or the entry into Avernus.