1864
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Proverbs: If Marion Will Dance, Then She Has to Take the Consequences is a 1864 by Francisco Goya, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A crowd dances in a dark room. Flickering light catches bare arms and bright skirts. A man claps castanets—wooden shells strapped to his fingers. You can almost hear the sharp clack over the music. Goya painted this scene late in life, when his eyesight failed. The dancers don’t care about rules. They just spin, lost in the moment. Look next at Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746–1828).
The freewheeling, lascivious dancers in Goya’s composion keep time with castanets, pairs of shell-shaped wooden clappers attached to the thumb and index finger. The erotic connotations of castanets dated from antiquity, when they were depicted in vase paintings in association with the cult of the goddess Cybele and the Dionysian rites. According to Martin Mersenne’s treatise, Les Preludes de l’harmonie universelle (1636), castanets were used to accompany the saraband, a fast folk dance considered disreputable in 16th-century Spain. Although by the time the saraband reached the French court in…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (; Spanish: ; 30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker.
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