GOYA'S ENGRAVINGS 57 whose wig announces his elite status. Mediating dialectically between tnese two extremities of the social ladder is a poor woman dancing with bared breasts in a stance which expresses jubilation and abandonment. Here is a vibrant image of those underprivileged individuals who have torn asunder the shackles of officially prescribed orderliness, and whose spirited defiance provides an exemplar to other members of their social class. Several of the 'madness' engravings demonstrate not only the horror and darkness, but also laughter and fun. The frame of the engraving "Merry Madness" is filled by happy, rejoicing people holding hands and dancing in a circle—the geometrical figure which is traditionally emblematic of concord, and which occurs in so many of Goya's works. The etching entitled "Carnival Madness" depicts a gathering of common folk watching with absorption the antics of a dancing duo who are performing in characteristic carnival masks. The merriment, conviviality and good-fellowship embodied in the scene recall Bakhtin's observations on carnivals, animal epics and laughter, in which he identifies the significance of laughter in folk culture as a means of combating the concepts, images, symbols and discipline of ruling class culture. "Laughter", writes Bakhtin, "overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibition, no liroitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and authority. (It) is the social consciousness of all the people (signifying) the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts." The trio of madness, spontaneity and laughter functions as a negatory protest against ruling-class "reason". But it also constitutes a positive alternative weltenschauung which acquires special meaning given the historical context of spontaneous popular uprisings all over Europe in this entire period from the 1760s right upto 1848, with the concomitant ascendancy of a culture from below. Thus we find Goya rejecting the ideological premises of a "high art" which prides itself in its separation from "low brow" entertainment forms, and drawing on popular cultural sources to invigorate, enrich and democratise his art. Near the end of his life Goya created a wonderful lithograph called "The Andalusian Dance" which celebrates the vibrance, zest and sheer joie de vivre embodied in the haunting flamenco music and dancing of the freedom-loving Spanish gypsies. A work such as this testifies by its marked contrast to the sombre, grim and bizarre projections'which pervade much of his artistic output, that Goya's crusade against human barbarism, injustice and unreason is actuated not as Ferrari supposes by a hatred of Man ingenere, but precisely by his faith in the joy and beauty which life can attain, and by his ardent committment to what he would term 'humanity". The initial impulse behind this article came from the revelatory experience of attending the exhibition of engravings, "GoVa and His Contemporaries" at the National Gallery of Mod-