Plate 42 from Los Caprichos: Thou Who Canst Not (Tu que no puedes)

Francisco de Goya

Etching and burnished aquatint

Museo del Prado

This etching and burnished aquatint, Plate 42 from Francisco de Goya's seminal series Los Caprichos, depicts two men straining under the weight of complacent donkeys riding on their backs — a visual rendering of the Spanish proverb 'Thou who canst not, carry me on your back.' The footwear of the laboring figures identifies them as peasants or common workers, and the image has been widely interpreted as a satire on the parasitic uselessness of the nobility and clergy, whose upkeep burdened the impoverished working population of late 18th-century Spain. Goya (1746–1828), court painter to Charles IV and one of the defining figures of Western art, employed the combined techniques of etching and aquatint — which he pioneered simultaneously — to produce prints of extraordinary painterly richness. Los Caprichos, a suite of eighty prints first published in 1799, stands as a landmark of Enlightenment-era social criticism and is widely recognized as a precursor to Modernism, Expressionism, and Surrealism.