Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) - Francisco Goya

Francisco Goya (1746 - 1828) was court painter to the Spanish Crown and a major influence in the use of the Romantic approach.  The Romantic style or Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement in the 18th Century that used intense emotion such as apprehension, horror, and awe when confronting the sublime(in nature).  While employed by the Spanish Crown, Goya painted portraits of Joseph Bonaparte, Charles IV of Spain, and documented the Peninsular war in a series of prints known as the Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War)c 1810-1820. The Peninsular War was a military conflict with Great Britain and Spain against France for control of the Iberian Peninsula.  Through his works he became a commentator and chronicler of his era. The subversive imaginative element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of artists of later generations, notably Manet, Picasso and Francis Bacon.(from Wikipedia) 
 
In his painting, Witches' Sabbath c 1798 (oil on canvas), Goya confronts Spain's' onset of superstition and corruption prevalent in the rural parts of the country.  In the work, he displays a group women (young and old), witches, with one holding a child, and the other a corpse, surrounding a goat with large horns under a night sky with a crescent moon and bats. Some of the women are presenting a child to the Devil as a rite of initiation.  The skeletons of two children and a three infant corpses dangling from a spike are horror inducing, it implies the goat, the Devil, feeds physically and spiritually upon the infants and children.  Goya displays witchcraft as being  a mockery to the Roman Catholicism and this scene of superstition is said to have taken place in the rural parts of Spain and Goya, as a member of the court, wanted to make a persuasive statement regarding this type of falsehood.

Goya revisits this notion in The Black Paintings: Witches' Sabbath c 1821-23 (mural), where the goat, in black, is presented again as the Devil, and he sits in front of a group of woman as if he is speaking.  In both paintings, the Romantic style derives its intensity from the horrifying appearance of the "goat", the witches, and the infant corpses,  and leads the audience into the need to act and stop such a bizarre falsehood from occurring.