Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) was a Spanish Romantic painter and printmaker. He is regarded as one of the most important Spanish artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected the political and social upheavals of his time and had a major influence on later European art.

One of his prints reads like a riddle: Beastly Nonsense, also known as Other Laws of the People or Who Will Bell the Cat? The work belongs to Goya’s Disparates, or Follies, a group of enigmatic prints built around proverbs, satire, political unease, and deliberately unstable meanings.

The print shows an elephant in profile, facing a small group of figures who approach it with caution. The animal occupies most of the composition. Its body is large, uneven, and darkly worked, with the curve of the back, the hanging trunk, and the heavy legs carefully defined. A bright, open space behind the elephant makes its mass more pronounced. In front of it, four figures in Eastern robes gather near its head. One holds an open book, perhaps a law book. Another holds a leather band fitted with bells, the kind used for mules and cattle. The figures seem to be presenting, persuading, or attempting to control the animal, although none appears willing to come too close. The scene is sparse and theatrical: an elephant, a book, a bell, and a group of men facing a task whose meaning remains difficult to fix.

The elephant in Goya’s Beastly Nonsense has an unexpected connection to Manila.

The story begins in India and the Philippines. Ambeth Ocampo has drawn attention to a rare Madrid publication from 1773 on elephants (see above), which included a notice about an elephant sent from the Philippines to King Charles III of Spain. The animal was reportedly sourced from the Coromandel Coast and given by Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah of Arcot to Simón de Anda y Salazar, governor and captain general of the Philippines. Rather than keeping it in Manila, Anda sent it onward to the Spanish king.

Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa’s study, “Un episodio en la recepción cultural dieciochesca de lo exótico: la llegada del elefante a Madrid en 1773,” gives the most detailed account of the elephant’s arrival and reception. On July 24, 1773, the frigate Venus, coming from Manila, disembarked an adult Asian elephant at the Isla de León, now San Fernando, near Cádiz. The animal had been sent by Simón de Anda to Charles III.

The transfer from Cádiz to the royal site of San Ildefonso was a carefully managed operation. Julián de Arriaga, secretary of the Indies and Navy, coordinated preparations with authorities in Cádiz, and the journey was entrusted to José de Mazarredo, a young frigate lieutenant. The escort included marines, sailors, artillerymen, a paymaster, and two Malabar elephant handlers who had accompanied the animal from Asia. Sánchez Espinosa gives their Christian names as Francisco de la Cruz and José Espino.
The itinerary was planned with the elephant’s health in mind. The party was to march only from dawn to eight in the morning and again from five in the afternoon until sunset, avoiding the worst of the summer heat. The proposed route ran from Isla de León through Jerez, Écija, Córdoba, Andújar, Bailén, La Carolina, Valdepeñas, Ocaña, Aranjuez, Valdemoro, Carabanchel, Aravaca, and finally San Ildefonso. Towns along the route were instructed to provide lodging, transport animals, food, and whatever extraordinary assistance was needed for the custody and preservation of the elephant.

The provisions were equally specific. The escort carried medicines, water barrels, rice, sugar, aguardiente for medicinal use, bread, green maize, and other grasses approved by Francisco de la Cruz. The galley also carried scarlet garments trimmed with gold for the elephant and its Malabar handler, made in Cádiz during the animal’s acclimatization and intended for its presentation to Charles III.

The authorities were also worried about crowds. Sánchez Espinosa notes that one of the organizers’ main concerns was preventing accidents caused by people drawn by curiosity to see the animal. The party finally left Isla de León on August 16 and took forty-two days to reach San Ildefonso.

The elephant reached the area near Madrid in September. Mazarredo complained that, because of its proximity to Madrid, people of high rank came to satisfy their curiosity, even when conditions made visits inconvenient. On September 26, after the final stage of the journey, the party arrived at San Ildefonso, where Arriaga and the king were waiting.

The elephant later stayed with the court at San Ildefonso, then went to El Escorial, and by October 27 was in Madrid while awaiting transfer to Aranjuez. Grimaldi informed Mazarredo that the king wanted the elephant to remain longer in Madrid so the public, religious communities, and schoolgirls could see it comfortably.

The animal caused a remarkable stir in Madrid. Sánchez Espinosa points to Ramón de la Cruz’s sainete El elefante fingido, which premiered on November 12, 1773, at the Teatro del Príncipe. The comedy was built around the public excitement caused by the elephant and the practical burdens imposed on towns expected to feed and house it.

Other images and texts also registered the event. Lorenzo Tiepolo’s pastel Mujer con mantilla y otras figuras includes an open fan decorated with the elephant, and Sánchez Espinosa connects this to the eighteenth-century fashion for reflecting current events in dress, accessories, and hairstyles. Tomás de Iriarte also wrote a satirical poem on the elephant’s fame, joking that the animal drew more attention in Madrid than “the gravest event in Europe.” The poem mentions elephant images on aprons, caps, and mantillas, and even elephant-shaped foods made of meat, sweets, and dough.

This was not Charles III’s first elephant. Sánchez Espinosa notes that Charles had owned one earlier during his reign in Naples. That animal had arrived from Turkey in 1742, was kept in the Portici menagerie, was painted for the king’s parents, and was later dissected after its death in 1756.

The Manila elephant eventually lived in Aranjuez, in the Casa de Vacas, where it was housed in a room and yard made for it. Aranjuez also contained other exotic animals, including camels, dromedaries, a “toro cibora,” zebras, and guanacos.

The elephant died in November 1777. On November 17, Pedro Franco Dávila, director of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, received notice from the Count of Floridablanca that “the large elephant of Aranjuez” had died and that the king wanted it dissected and brought to the Royal Cabinet. Juan Bautista Brú began the work at once. He prepared drawings with the animal’s measurements and anatomy, while later work in Madrid produced both a skeleton and a mounted elephant for public display.

The plate had a complicated publication history. It was one of four copper plates that came into the possession of Eugenio Lucas, probably around 1856. After Lucas’s death in 1870, the plates were offered to the Academy in Spain. No agreement was reached, and they eventually left the country. They were acquired by the French dealer Edmond Sagot. In 1877, the French magazine L’Art published the prints. Since the editors did not know the workshop proofs that carried handwritten titles, they supplied their own. This plate was titled Other Laws for the People, with the elephant interpreted as the common people under Ferdinand VII, subject to laws different from those of the privileged classes.

The elephant was copied from a pen-and-ink drawing now in the Prado Museum. The Prado notes that the drawing may have been made before the other preparatory drawings for the Disparates, since it does not correspond to them technically or stylistically. Goya may have copied the animal from life, since an elephant from Manila arrived in Spain in 1773 and became very popular. From the Prado drawing, he took the elephant on the left, traced it onto the copper plate, and engraved it with precision. Fundación Goya en Aragón also notes that Goya used the elephant on the left of the drawing as the basis for the print, tracing it onto the copper so that it appeared in reverse.

The scene has been connected to the Spanish saying poner el cascabel al gato, or “to bell the cat.” The phrase refers to a dangerous undertaking that is easy to propose and difficult to carry out. The fable appears in Félix María Samaniego’s collection as “The Congress of Mice.” In the story, the mice agree that a bell should be tied to the cat so they can hear it coming. The plan is approved, and the problem remains: who will actually do it?

The later title, Other Laws for the People, gives the print a political reading. The open book has been read as a possible law book. The bell points to the proverb. The elephant may refer to the animal from Manila that entered Spain’s public imagination in 1773. The image remains difficult to interpret with certainty.

There is also an earlier account of an elephant in Manila. Francisco Ignacio Alcina wrote about an elephant kept by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century. Alcina described the animal as having a taste for wine. According to his account, the elephant could sniff out wine casks in the Colegio or in the storeroom of the Procurator General, uncover them with its trunk, and drink from them. When intoxicated, it would go into the countryside until the effects passed, then return docilely.

Alcina also wrote that when the elephant was hungry, it went among the houses of the natives, who gave it rice or fruit. Those who refused risked damage to their houses, as the animal would strike the posts, tear them off, and flatten the structures. The story ends cruelly. A Jesuit brother, angered by the elephant’s mischief, tied it with strong ropes to a tree and left it to die of hunger. Alcina noted that because the animal had cost him little, the Jesuit brother showed little concern for its death.

The two accounts of elephants belong to different centuries but both show that elephants had a place in Manila’s colonial history before Goya made his print. One elephant lived in the seventeenth-century Jesuit world of Manila. Another passed through Manila in the eighteenth century on its way to Charles III’s court. That later animal may have provided the living model, or at least the memory, behind the elephant that Goya traced and engraved.

Notes

[1] Ambeth R. Ocampo, “An Elephant from 1700s PH in Madrid,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 26, 2023, https://opinion.inquirer.net/162681/an-elephant-from-1700s-ph-in-madrid.

[2] Birgit Tremml-Werner, “The Elephant in the Archive: Knowledge Construction and Late Eighteenth-Century Global Diplomacy,” Itinerario 47, no. 2 (2023): 185–202. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115323000165.

[3] Archivo General de Indias, Filipinas 390, n. 50, “Testigos sobre elefante para el rey,” November 22, 1773.

[4] Archivo General de Indias, Contratación 2437, n. 3, 1773. For the transportation to Spain on the frigate Venus under the command of Juan de Lángara.

[5] Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, “Un episodio en la recepción cultural dieciochesca de lo exótico: la llegada del elefante a Madrid en 1773,” Goya: Revista de Arte 295–296 (2003): 269–286.

[6] Read more about Goya’s print here in Thomas Harris, Goya: Engravings and Lithographs; Elena Santiago, María Luisa Cuenca, and Javier Docampo, Catálogo de las estampas de Goya en la Biblioteca Nacional.