Modo de volar (A Way of Flying)

Francisco Goya

Etching, aquatint, and drypoint on paper

Museo del Prado

Modo de volar (A Way of Flying) is the thirteenth plate in Francisco Goya's enigmatic series Los Disparates, created between 1815 and 1816 using etching, aquatint, and drypoint. The composition depicts figures harnessing mechanical wing-like contraptions to take flight against a deep, velvety black aquatint sky, rendered with Goya's characteristically unsettling blend of the rational and the grotesque; the lead figure wears a cap fashioned in the form of a bird of prey's head. Goya (1746–1828), the preeminent Spanish painter and printmaker of his age, created Los Disparates during a period of personal and political turbulence following the Peninsular War, and the series—his last great etched sequence—was never published in his lifetime, appearing posthumously in 1864 under the title Los Proverbios by the Real Academia de Nobles Artes de San Fernando. Scholars have interpreted the theme of flight across Goya's oeuvre as a recurring metaphor for human irrationality, instability, and the inconstancy of fortune, while others read it as an allusion to political and philosophical innovation.