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…
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…
Most paintings hang quietly on museum walls – but The Garden of Earthly Delights has been sparking arguments, inspiring nightmares, and baffling scholars for over five hundred years. It also contains a scrap of musical notation inked across a damned soul’s buttocks, which a student transcribed in 2014 and turned into an internet phenomenon. Quick…