The Shameless

A man with a huge nose, bushy eyebrows, a big mouth and no chin, wears breeches on his head. He is eating with a spoon from a bowl held by another character with a deformed face. In the background is a man with an alienated face and clenched fists, wearing a nightdress and nightcap.

Goya used aquatint on almost the entire surface of the engraving, while he used etching to create the figures and worked intensely on the clothes of the man eating with a spoon. He has reserved a white area under the plate that could allude to the soup that has fallen. There are no spatial references to indicate where these three figures are located or to provide any information for the interpretation of the scene.

This is a rather complex print for which the surviving manuscripts do not provide very clear guidelines for interpretation. The Prado Museum and Ayala manuscripts give the same explanation: "There are men whose face is the most indecent part of their whole body, and it would be good for those who have the unfortunate and ridiculous ones to put them in their breeches". The manuscript of the National Library tells us the following about this engraving: "Men with big noses are usually also men with big birote and fat gandumbas. As they usually engage in sodomy, the latter is represented with breeches for a cap, revealing his shame through the trap, and in the act of lying on a poor devil and rolling up his skirtsleeves".

This engraving must be related to some works in which Goya has dealt with madness or mental derangement, such as Barnyard of Madmen. The absorbed posture of the figure in the background leads us to think that it could be a scene taking place inside an insane asylum. The Aragonese painter questioned on several occasions what was going on in the abysses of the human mind, the irrational and the uncontrollable, subjects that had been dealt with by artists in an exceptional manner up to that time.