Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) posthumously. Around 1874, some fifty years after his death, the plaster murals were taken down and transferred to canvas supports. "Witches' Sabbath" was much wider before transfer – it was the broadest of the Black Paintings. During the transfer about of the painting was cut from the right-hand side. At its reduced dimensions of 141 × 436 cm (56 × 172 in), its framing is unusually tightly cropped, which some critics find adds to its haunted, spectral aura, although others believe it distorts Goya's intentions by moving the centre of balance and reducing the painting's impact. Goya did not title
Witches' Sabbath accounts viewed them as a kind of Witches' Sabbath, but they are not. Some African communities believe in witchcraft, but as in the European witch trials, people they believe to be "witches" are condemned rather than embraced. Other historians, including Carlo Ginzburg, Éva Pócs, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen hold that these testimonies can give insights into the belief systems of the accused. Ginzburg famously discovered records of a group of individuals in northern Italy, calling themselves "benandanti", who believed that they went out of their bodies in spirit and fought amongst the clouds against evil spirits to secure prosperity