This one is no less so

Several well-dressed figures, probably members of the nobility, carry an image of the Virgin on their shoulders. Behind them is a group of people carrying another religious image. Jesusa Vega has interpreted this to be the Virgin of Solitude, to whom Ferdinand VII entrusted himself, asking her to preserve his health, and the Virgin of Atocha, in whose hands the monarch had left the country when he left the throne in 1808.

In order to be able to read this print properly, it is also necessary to analyse the one that precedes it, No. 66, Strange Devotion. Both the titles and the composition used link the two prints and suggest an analogous relationship between them. The two prints show a sacred image being carried in the first case by a donkey, and in the second by a group of members of the aristocracy.

Nigel Glendinning suggests that the source of inspiration for engraving no. 66 may be the fables of Félix María Samaniego (Laguardia, Álava, 1745-1801) and José Agustín Ibáñez de la Rentería (Bilbao, 1751-Lequeitio, 1826). Engraving no. 66 reproduces the first part of them, in which the image is described. The second part, the moralising part, could be the one condensed in print no. 67, the one we are dealing with here. 

If we compare this engraving with the previous one, we come to the conclusion that it is quite likely that the criticism is focused on the social class, well characterised by its somewhat old-fashioned clothing as Glendinning has noted, rather than on the circumstance that unfolds before our eyes. In this way, Goya would be questioning the aristocracy that revitalised this type of belief after the War of Independence, even when a certain sector of the Church itself questioned it.