The mythological handling of the theme of symbolic castration is an anomaly in Goya's work, but the theme itself is a constant. To follow its mutations would no doubt prove enlightening. I shall begin with a first example. Capricho 35 depicts life in Madrid at the end of the eighteenth century, through a mix, typical of Goya, of the concrete (clothes) and the abstract (space). The artist is thereby suggesting that the scene we are witnessing is both dated and timeless, particular and universal. A young man is allowing three women to shave him; one holds the razor, the other two hold the barber's instruments. The young man's face is almost as smooth as a young girl's. Furthermore, the sheet wrapped around his shoulders makes it even more difficult to identify his sex, so much so that we might even be led to believe that this is just women having fun. However, the grammatical form of the inscription (Le descanona) proves the seated person is indeed a man. It can be interpreted in at least two ways ('She is shaving him the wrong way'/ 'She is plucking him'), whereas the ambiguity of the text?image binomial is even more complex. What we have in effect is not only a reformulation of the very same situation illustrated in the Classical repertoire through the Hercules/ Omphale theme (theme of an earlier painting by Goya) but also the same pyramidal compositional blueprint that establishes women 'on top' and man 'underneath'.

All that Goya's misogynous as well as misanthropic Capricho does is give an ancient topos a new form: that of the feminization of man under the control of women. The eighteenth century was full of people bemoaning this fact (has there ever been a time when they were not?). In L'Annee merveilleuse ou les hommes-femmes (1754), for example, the author, Father Coyer, predicted a time of 'great change' when 'men would be changed into women, and women into men'.

The specular relationship between the mythological painting (Hercules and Omphale) and the criticism of social customs (Capricho 35)is echoed in Goya's work by the position the artist gives in his drawings to the theme of gender?role reversal. The drawings appear to be a coarse and direct experience in which the carnivalesque emerges clearly. It is in this light that a whole series of images, involving the traditional canons of masculinity, must be examined.
My intention is to re-question the theme of the monstrous body in Goya's work by comparing his process with the tradition of earlier anatomical scientific illustrations, and especially with the article Androgyne in Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie (1751-1772).