Disparate de miedo (Folly of Fear)

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

Etching and aquatint

Museo del Prado

Disparate de miedo (Folly of Fear), also known by its proverb title Por temor no pierdas honor (Do not lose honour through fear), is Plate 2 from Goya's final and most enigmatic print series, Los Disparates (The Follies), created between approximately 1816 and 1819. The composition depicts a group of soldiers cowering on the ground in terror before a looming, phantom-like puppet figure—an irrational spectacle that subverts martial dignity and reason. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), the great Spanish court painter and printmaker, executed the series in etching and aquatint, employing dramatic contrasts of light and shadow to produce a deeply unsettling visual language. The series—Goya's last etched work—was not published during his lifetime, presumably due to the repressive political climate of Fernandian Spain, and was first made public by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1864 under the collective title Los Proverbios.