Prado manuscript: ‘In all sciences, there are charlatans who, without having studied one bit, know everything and have a solution for everything. One should not have trust in anything that they say. The true wise man is always careful about asserting anything; he promises little but accomplishes a great deal; Count Palatino does not achieve anything that he promises.’

‘This print could refer to a specific event and a specific person which none of the Goya texts seems to have identified. While the Prado text refers to a ‘Count Palatino’, both the Ayala and the Madrid Biblioteca Nacional texts refer to ‘Counts and Marquis’. The Ayala text: ‘Charlatans and Teeth-Pullers, feigning to be Counts and Marquis, sell their drugs very well’. Lopez-Rey has noted the bilingual (Italian and Spanish) caption for the drawing: ‘Every word is a lie. The charlatan who pulls out a jawbone and they believe it’. In the background of the preparatory drawing for the print, what appears to be a monk is lying down and a woman and apparently a bishop are looking on. These three figures do not appear in the final etching. The ‘charlatan’ in both the drawing and the print appears to be a nobleman. Thus, Goya's print could be a general attack against charlatanism (the use of sham learning) as well as against the nobility and the clergy which used such charlatanism for their own ends.’

Johnson, R. S., Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos, R.S. Johnson Fine Art, Chicago, 1992, p. 92.