The Proverbs: If Marion Will Dance, Then She Has to Take the Consequences (1864): Art, History and Details

The Proverbs: If Marion Will Dance, Then She Has to Take the Consequences (1864) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746–1828).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The freewheeling, lascivious dancers in Goya’s composion keep time with castanets, pairs of shell-shaped wooden clappers attached to the thumb and index finger. The erotic connotations of castanets dated from antiquity, when they were depicted in vase paintings in association with the cult of the goddess Cybele and the Dionysian rites. According to Martin Mersenne’s treatise, Les Preludes de l’harmonie universelle (1636), castanets were used to accompany the saraband, a fast folk dance considered disreputable in 16th-century Spain. Although by the time the saraband reached the French court in the 17th century, it had become a slow, serious, processional dance, Goya refers here to the dance’s earlier, erotic origins.

Object facts

• Title: The Proverbs: If Marion Will Dance, Then She Has to Take the Consequences
• Date: 1864
• Creator attribution: Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746–1828)
• Culture: Spain
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching and aquatint
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1928.102.12

Collection credit

Gift of Grover Higgins

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.