Evoking that uneasiness that wells up in us at the first thought of some unfathomable power, Goya's "Giant" is staggering. This rarity ranks with works by Dürer and Rembrandt as one of the most impressive images ever printed from a copperplate.

Like a mezzotint engraver, Goya proceeded to scrape highlights into metal previously roughened with grainy aquatint. Thus he sculpted this gargantuan colossus—Prometheus, Zeus, god of war—or what you will, out of darkness. Everything that held Goya in awe seems to have been compacted into this mysterious, ominous being.

Georges Prévôt

Harris 29.I ; Delteil 35

MMA 1995, fig.15. p.71

William M. Ivins Jr. "Goya's Giant" in Metropolitan Museum Studies. 5, New York, 1934-1936, ill.

Tomás Harris Goya: Engravings and Lithographs Vol. I: Text and Illustrations; Vol.II: Catalogue Raisonné. Oxford, 1964, cat. no. 29.I, ill.

A. Hyatt Mayor "Goya's Giant" Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. 8, 30, August 1935. New York, 1935, pp. 153-54, ill.

A. Hyatt Mayor Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures. New York, 1971 (reprinted 1980), fig. no. 630, ill.

Eleanor Sayre, Sue Welsh Reed The Changing Image: Prints by Francisco Goya. Boston, 1974, cat. no. 231, ill.

Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Eleanor Sayre Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment Ex. cat. Museo del Prado, October 6-December 18, 1988 ; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 18-March 26, l989 ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 9-July 16, 1989 (English edition). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, 1988, cat. no. 117, p. 258, ill.

Colta Ives, Susan Alyson Stein Goya in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1995, fig. no. 15, pp. 26-27, 71, ill.