SOURCE: Herzberger, David K. “The Painterly Vision of Buero Vallejo's El sueño de la razón.” Symposium XXXIX, no. 2 (summer 1985): 93-103.

In the following essay, Herzberger maintains that the artistic metaphor in El sueño de la razón is the key to fully understanding the structural and thematic unity of the play.

Francisco de Goya first appears in El sueño de la razón in the second scene of Act One, a scene repeated early in Act Two: the artist at work, painting. It is not a fortuitous configuration of events that advances this view of the protagonist near the beginning of each act. For painting (and the nature of art) inheres in the basic structure of Sueño and provides the frame within which it unfolds. As a number of critics have pointed out, most of Sueño develops with Goya as the center...