La Procesión de Disciplinantes. De la Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Goya y la religiosidad popular

Francisco de Goya repeated with some frequency paintings and drawings on the theme of religious processions. Among these small format pictures is the Procession of Flagelantes in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes, Madrid. Writers of the period of the Spanish Enlightenment, Goya’s friends such as Meléndez Valdés, criticized these processions, considering them to be both irreverent and scandalous. In 1783, King Charles III prohibited them at the request of the ecclesiastical authority. Goya drew and painted these processions as colourful and picturesque scenes, an expression of the plebeian piety that he himself professed, without the critical and mocking spirit that some scholars have wanted to see in them.