Helmut Jacobs

The discussion about imagination and fancy in XVIIIth century Spain was influ-enced by the national tradition as well as by other European countries. The termsfantasía, imaginación, imaginativaand caprichoand their various meanings in thedictionaries and literature of the Spanish Enlightenment are systematicallyanalysed. The term fancy, for example, can refer to an innate faculty of the soul or apersonal characteristic, to human creativity or to works of art. Other interesting aspects are the physiological explanations of fancy, the relationship between fancyand madness or melancholy, the theories of female fancy and the influence of thematernal imagination on the unborn child, and also the assumption that fancy canhave an epistemological function. Typical of the Spanish discussion is a higher ap-preciation of fancy as a creative faculty independent of reason and rules. Goya’sCapricho 43(›El sueno de la razón produce monstruos‹) is a famous example ofthis concept.

This article examines the change in meaning of the Spanish term ›invención‹, from ›search for and collection of existing premises‹ to ›invention of something new‹, a change which took place in the 18th century. Dictionaries and representative examples of Spanish literature from the Age of Enlightenment are analysed. The rôle of ›invención‹ in painting changes particularly which becomes apparent by a comparison of Palomino in the first half of the 18th century to Goya and his contemporaries in the second half. Major differences between the two artists consist in self-assurance and self-assessment.The ›invención‹ also plays an important rôle in the discussion of the term ›Genius‹, a discussion which had already begun in Spanish Renaissance and which continued intensively through the 18th century.