El entierro de la sardina

Masked revellers dance toward the river under a black banner with a grinning face. Goya's carnival looks joyful at first glance, then the blank masks and darkening trees start to unsettle.

The story behind the painting

The title was given after Goya's death and refers to the Entierro de la Sardina, the closing event of a three-day carnival in Madrid that ended on Ash Wednesday. Masked and disguised revellers dance their way to the banks of the Manzanares, where a ceremonial sardine will be buried. The panel has been dated anywhere between 1793 and 1819, though most accounts place it toward the end of that range; Wikidata gives 1814.

What to look for

Goya shows neither the sardine nor the large straw doll, the pelele, from which it hung. The centrepiece is the darkly grinning King of the Carnival on a black banner. Women in white dance gaily, surrounded by masked and blank faces, grey twisted trees and encroaching dark colours. The word mortus, death, is barely visible on the banner, though in Goya's preparatory ink sketch it stands out over an indistinct shape that may be the sardine itself.

Meaning and intent

The painting is a tribute to the common people, an exuberant crowd carousing on the first day of Lent while other Catholics worship in church. Yet such festivals began with themes of mortality: masks were worn to ward off the spirits of criminals and of those who had died violently. The scholar Fred Licht praised every brushstroke as a calligraphic marvel, and felt beneath the gaiety the disturbing undertones of mass hysteria.

Legacy

The work stands between Goya's bright tapestry cartoons of popular entertainments and his later, darker Black Paintings; Licht called it the perfect balancing point between them. It forms a loose set with other scenes of religious ceremony from the same years, such as A Procession of Flagellants and Inquisition Scene. Today the panel is held at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, the city whose carnival it shows.