Allison Meier reviews the exhibition Visions and Nightmares: Four Centuries of Spanish Drawings at the Morgan Library, New York, on view through May 11, 2014. The show includes works from the 16th to the 19th century and features drawings by Goya, Ribera, Murillo, Vicente Carducho, Alonso Cano, Eugenio Lucas, and others.

Meier writes: "Given that the spread of the Catholic Church brought the brutality of the Inquisition, it shouldn’t be surprising that saintly specters and phantasmagoric gore make appearances throughout the drawings. From Eugenio Lucas’s murky depiction of the Grim Reaper pondering a book propped upon a kneeling man to Francisco Goya’s tormented woman pulled from her sleep to the back of a raging bull, unsettling visuals abound… it’s the surprising variety and execution of the art that’s likely to have the most lasting impact."