Many scholars consider this the better of the two paintings. Goya made it several years after the nude, and it shows in every stroke — the paint is laid on faster, broader, with far more freedom. The nude is smooth and worked up; the clothed maja is painted with bravura. If you only look at…
Direct eye contact was not the scandal here. Titian’s Venus of Urbino had done that 250 years earlier, and Goya knew it. The break was something else: this is the first known painting in Western art to show a woman’s pubic hair, with no mythological cover and no gesture of modesty. For the Inquisition that…
In 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, a lorry carrying the Prado’s two great Goya canvases of 1808 crashed at Benicarló, on the Mediterranean coast. The Second of May, travelling on its stretcher, was torn into several pieces. It was patched together provisionally, but some fragments could not be put back, and for seventy years…
For the first forty years, nobody saw this painting. Commissioned in 1814, it went into storage and the first firm record of it hanging in the Prado dates from 1872. The reason was simple: Ferdinand VII, who paid for it, was building his legitimacy on the return of a rightful monarch — not on a…
This is not quite what Goya painted. Before the mural was transferred from wall to canvas in 1874, the photographer Jean Laurent recorded it — and the photograph shows something else. The image was wider, and elements on the right no longer exist. The restorer removed them during the transfer. What hangs in the Prado…