Affiliation

A seated woman in profile in the foreground wears a fox's mask over her face and a grotesque mask on her lap. In front of her, a priest or a woman - the identity of this personage is unclear - is verifying the executor's certificate attesting to the young woman's lineage. It seems that she is going to marry the figure standing next to her in the background, although it could also be a bailiff who is checking that the act is going well. The latter has a deformed face with a long, ostentatious nose, and adjusts a pair of glasses to see better. On the right of the engraving is a rapt figure with clasped hands, and on the left is a crowd, a dehumanised mass that is mostly undefined. The light is concentrated on the two figures in the foreground, while the rest are practically unilluminated, which accentuates the idea of indefiniteness.

The manuscripts agree that this is the moment before a marriage in which the bride's origins are being explained to her future husband. In the Biblioteca Nacional manuscript, the significance of the glasses, which are placed high up in the centre of the composition, is specified. They are used to see what is near, that is to say, to look more closely at things, overcoming all appearances.

The bride wears a fox mask over her face which, as in many other cases of Goya's use of masks, reveals the woman's true identity, rather than concealing it as one might think.

A careful analysis of the preparatory drawings will help us to understand how Goya's work evolved until he arrived at the present engraving. In the first drawing, which is the one in the Madrid Album, the mask between her legs has clear sexual connotations that could be an allusion to the young woman's possible hermaphroditism. Goya gradually modified this object until it became a grotesque mask without such explicit sexual connotations.