The Witches' Flight

The Witches' Flight (Vuelo de brujas) is a small oil-on-canvas painting by Francisco Goya, made around 1798 for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna and now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, the only one of its series in that museum.

Between 1797 and 1798 Goya painted six small canvases on witchcraft and the supernatural for the Osunas' new country house, El Capricho, at the Alameda outside Madrid. His invoice to the duke, dated 27 June 1798, charges six thousand reales for "six paintings on themes of witches". Such subjects were fashionable among the enlightened nobility, and the duchess's mother had a known taste for the esoteric. Goya was working on Los Caprichos at the time. The scholar Frank Irving Heckes argues that this was meant as the first picture of the series.

In a beam of light from outside the picture, three figures in skirts, bare to the waist and wearing tall pointed hats decorated with small snakes, carry a naked man through the night sky; the Prado notes that their puffed cheeks show them blowing into his body. Below, on a mountain path, one peasant has thrown himself to the ground and covers his ears against the noise, while another walks on with a white blanket over his head, making the fig sign against the evil eye. Their donkey has stopped further down, a symbol of ignorance in Goya's work. X-rays and infrared reflectography show that the blanketed man was first painted from behind, heading back down the path. The hats recall both the corozas the Inquisition placed on the condemned and bishops' mitres, so most scholars read the picture as an Enlightenment attack on superstition that turns religious tribunals' accusations back on themselves.

The canvas measures 43.5 × 30.5 cm. After the Osuna sale it passed through the Ibarra family and other Bilbao collections, was bought by Jaime Ortiz Patiño in 1985, and was acquired by the Prado at a Sotheby's sale in Madrid with funds from the Villaescusa bequest. It features in Danny Boyle's 2013 film Trance.