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. "MMA Studies 5" Goya's Giant. New York, 1934-1936, ill.

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

A. Hyatt Mayor "Goya's Giant". 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.

Eleanor Sayre, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment. Boston, 1988-89, cat. no. 117, p. 258, ill.

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