This is the worst!

In a landscape, a wolf, although it has sometimes been said to be a fox, sits on its hindquarters and writes on a parchment the following sentence: Miser humanity, the fault is yours. Casti. In front of him prostrates a friar who holds the inkwell and looks at him with devotion. He is surrounded by a large group of people with emaciated faces, perhaps as a result of hunger and war. On the right of the engraving two of them are dressed in rags and one has his hands tied with a rope.

In this case there is no doubt about the influence that the text by Giambattista Casti (Viterbo or Acquapendente, 1724-Paris, 1803) Gli animali parlanti (1801) had on the creation of this print, as Goya himself wrote a fragment of this work on the paper on which he wrote the animal in the scene. Gli animali parlanti was translated into Spanish in 1813 by Francisco Rodríguez de Ledesma and published by the Espinosa press. Although only two cantos were published, according to the title of the Spanish version, the work had been translated in its entirety: Animals talking. Epic poem divided into twenty-six verses, by Juan Bautista Casti. It might also be thought that Goya had read it all in Italian, of which he must have had a discreet knowledge thanks to his stay in that country (1769-1771). This print could be a representation of a poem from Canto XXI, where Goya changed the original word for "slave" to "wretch". In Casti's text, the prime minister in charge of starting the war is a fox, who in this print could be signing a decree with the approval of the Church, symbolised in the print by the friar holding the inkwell.

If it were a wolf, Goya would be referring to the cunning and ferocity with which the rulers convinced the people that all the misfortunes that had befallen them were their fault.