Women / Snake

Between 1797 and 1798 Goya executed a series of seven drawings that were never engraved and which form a homogeneous group known as Magic Mirror. In all of them a figure, either a man or a woman, stands in front of a mirror in which he sees his image reflected in the form of an animal. Gassier states that these drawings are highly symbolic and represent the different types of human personalities.

Several scholars of Goya's work have analysed these drawings in depth, such as Folke Nordström, who in his Goya, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the Art of Goya, published in 1962, devoted an entire chapter to a detailed study of the compositions, giving each character a different type of temperament. Thus, the woman/snake would be the melancholic; the dandy/monkey the sanguine; the bailiff/cat the choleric; and the student/frog the phlegmatic. However, in 2000, the French Hispanist René Andioc contradicted Nordström in his article "Characters and faces of the late 18th century. El currutaco, according to Goya and the literature of his time", pointing out that the meaning of these drawings should be sought in the Aragonese artist's Madrid environment, as Pierre Gassier had already suggested in the catalogue Drawings by Goya of 1975, in which he pointed out that the symbolism of these drawings could come from the readings Goya regularly attended and the conversations he held in the gatherings he attended in Madrid. Gassier also suggested that these drawings could simply be a way of ridiculing certain of the artist's contemporary types, relating this attitude to that also found in some of the Caprices.

In this drawing, an elegantly dressed lady stands without looking in front of a large mirror in which her image is reflected in the form of a snake coiled around a scythe and shackled to it. Nordström, following López-Rey, claims that Goya was familiar with Bernard de Montfaucon's famous work L'Antiquité expliquée of 1719, in which several illustrations of Saturn appear as a half-naked man with two symbols: a scythe or sickle and a serpent coiled around a trunk. According to Nordström, the planet Saturn controls the melancholic temperament, which is considered to be characteristic of the female sex.

The drawing, mainly in pen, is characterised by its masterly and modern abbreviated technique.