Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) whose full-length portrait appears in the same series. As with the other "Black Paintings", Goya began with a black background which he painted over with lighter pigments, then with broad, heavy brushstrokes of grey, blue and brown. The darker areas were achieved by leaving the black under-paint exposed; this is most obvious in the figure of the Devil. Like the other works in the series, "Witches' Sabbath" is worked up through heavy, slashing brushstrokes. The plaster was underlaid with thick carbon black before the paint was applied in hues of white lead, Prussian blue, vermilion of mercury, and crystals of
Witches' Sabbath and Amanita muscaria by name, and confining himself to but a single paragraph on the 'flying ointment' on page 303 of 'Ecstasies...' : In the Sabbath the judges more and more frequently saw the accounts of real, physical events. For a long time the only dissenting voices were those of the people who, referring back to the "Canon episcopi", saw witches and sorcerers as the victims of demonic illusion. In the sixteenth century scientists like Cardano or Della Porta formulated a different opinion : animal metamorphoses, flights, apparitions of the devil were the effect of malnutrition or the use of