María Josefa Pimentel, Duchess of Osuna who became patrons of the painter Francisco de Goya. The Duchess not only purchased one of the first editions of "Los Caprichos", but also commissioned a series of cabinet paintings on the subject of witchcraft from Goya, amongst them "El aquelarre" ("Witches' Sabbath"). In the famous portrait Goya painted of her, she is shown standing with noble reserve, and dressed according to the fashion initiated by Queen Marie Antoinette in Paris at that time. In another famous painting, Goya portrayed the ducal family. The Duchess was interested in landscape gardening and from the 1780s she developed a garden at El
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