50 Fun Facts About Francisco Goya

Goya's farmhouse near Madrid was nicknamed for an earlier owner with which condition, one Goya shared?

Deafness gave the Quinta del Sordo its name, but the name honoured a previous owner. Goya had lost his own hearing to a mystery illness in the winter of 1792–93, a blow that turned his art darker.

When Francisco Goya's body was exhumed in France for reburial in Madrid, which part of him was missing?

His skull was gone when the grave was opened. Told of the problem by the consul, officials in Madrid wired back: "Send Goya, with or without head."

Which Roman god is said to be the wild-eyed figure eating his own child in one of Goya's Black Paintings?

Saturn, fearing a prophecy that one of his children would overthrow him, ate them as they were born. Goya painted the scene in his dining room, and in the myth the god swallows them whole.

Francisco Goya's portrait of which British commander was stolen from London's National Gallery in 1961?

The Duke of Wellington sat for Goya in Madrid in 1812, fresh from victory at Salamanca. The stolen portrait came back four years later, and a jury convicted a bus driver only of stealing the frame.

Gerald Holtom said the despairing peasant in Goya's The Third of May 1808 helped inspire which 1958 emblem?

The peace sign also combines the semaphore signals for N and D, for nuclear disarmament. Holtom said he drew himself in despair, palms outstretched like Goya's peasant, though that figure's arms point up.

Francisco Goya painted a twin of The Naked Maja showing the same woman in the same pose; what differs?

She is clothed in the second canvas, wearing the costume of a maja, a fashionable working-class woman of Madrid. The two pictures usually hang side by side.

What object on the ground lights the victims of the French firing squad in Goya's The Third of May 1808?

A lantern, large and square, sits between the soldiers and the men they are about to shoot. Its glare falls on a prisoner in a white shirt whose arms are flung wide.

Spain's Goya Awards, whose trophy is a bronze bust of the painter, honour the best in which art form?

Cinema is the art they honour, at a ceremony first held in Madrid in 1987. The bust each winner takes home is the work of the sculptor José Luis Fernández.

In 1930 Spain caused an international scandal by printing Goya's The Naked Maja on what everyday item?

Postage stamps carried the nude in a 1930 set honouring Goya, two years after the centenary of his death. By the end of that year the United States had banned mail bearing them from entering the country.

On which surface did Goya paint his fourteen Black Paintings, never meaning anyone to see them?

Plaster walls in his own farmhouse were the surface, and he gave the pictures no titles. Some fifty years later an owner had them taken down and mounted on canvas, damaging most of them.

Which Madrid museum holds more works by Goya than by any other artist, including his Black Paintings?

The Prado opened to the public in 1819, the very year Goya bought the farmhouse where he painted his darkest murals. Those murals were given to the museum in 1881.

Goya's The Disasters of War prints record atrocities from Spain's struggle against which invading ruler?

Napoleon had put his own brother on the Spanish throne in 1808, and six years of war followed. Goya's 82 plates stayed unpublished until 1863, when it was at last judged safe to print them.

One of Goya's Black Paintings shows only the head of which animal, gazing up into a vast empty space?

A dog peers upward, its body hidden behind a dark slope, and nothing else appears in the picture. The museum's own label suggests the animal is in distress and apparently drowning.

Which spectacle did Goya depict in 33 prints published in 1816, having once painted himself dressed for it?

Bullfighting fascinated Goya so much that he once signed a letter as Francisco of the Bulls. The print series, La Tauromaquia, was neither a critical nor a commercial success.

In Goya's Witches' Sabbath paintings, the Devil presides over the coven in the shape of which animal?

A goat, huge and horned, looms over a circle of terrified old women. When the later mural was moved to canvas, about 140 centimetres were cut from its right-hand side.

Which Church body seized Goya's The Naked Maja as obscene and summoned the painter to explain himself?

The Inquisition wanted to know why he had painted it and at whose request. Goya escaped prosecution when the tribunal accepted that he was following the tradition of Titian and Velázquez.

Goya's 1820 self-portrait shows him held up in bed by which person, thanked for saving his life?

His doctor, Eugenio García Arrieta, supports the weak painter from behind and holds a glass of medicine to his lips. Goya made the picture as a present for the man who nursed him through 1819.

In Goya's etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, which creatures swarm around the sleeping artist?

Owls and bats crowd the darkness behind him, read as emblems of folly and ignorance. Many think the sleeper is Goya himself, slumped among his drawing tools.

Francisco Goya's sunny early paintings such as The Parasol were made as full-size designs for what?

Tapestries woven from his designs decorated and insulated the royal residences around Madrid. Goya found the work neither prestigious nor well paid, but it brought him to wider attention.

Which Velázquez masterpiece did Goya echo by painting himself at an easel behind Charles IV's family?

Las Meninas also shows its painter at work beside royalty. Goya, though, left out the servants and attendants: his picture is simply a group of people posing for a painting.

Which Spanish artist's 1951 Massacre in Korea restages the firing squad of Goya's The Third of May 1808?

Pablo Picasso painted it during the Korean War as a direct echo of Goya's composition. His 1937 Guernica is also cited as owing a debt to the same canvas.

The man in the white shirt with raised arms in Goya's The Third of May 1808 is often compared to which figure?

The crucified Christ is echoed in his outflung arms, and his right hand bears a mark like a nail wound. He also wears yellow and white, the heraldic colours of the papacy.

Twice turned down by Madrid's Royal Academy, the young Goya paid his own way to study art in which country?

Italy drew him to Rome, then the cultural capital of Europe. Early biographers spun tall tales about the trip, claiming he worked as a street acrobat or plotted to abduct a nun from her convent.

Francisco Goya is often described as the first of the moderns and the last of which group of painters?

The Old Masters label suits his early career of courtly Rococo designs and royal portraits. His late nightmares, painted for no one, went on to inspire artists such as Salvador Dalí.

Francisco Goya's tomb lies in a small Madrid chapel whose dome is decorated with what?

His own frescoes, finished in six months in 1798, show Saint Anthony working a miracle before a crowd of ordinary people. A twin chapel was built next door in 1928 so the original could become a museum.

A crater named after Goya lies on which world, where craters honour artists and writers?

Mercury is where most craters take the names of famous writers, artists and composers. Astronomers adopted Goya's name for this one in 1976.

Goya's The Second of May 1808 was torn when a truck evacuating Madrid's art crashed during which Spanish conflict?

The Civil War brought bombs to Madrid in 1936, so the government sent its masterpieces away for safety. The canvas was left with tears and missing pieces, and was restored again in 2008.

A copy of a Goya portrait stolen in London hangs in the villain's lair in which James Bond film?

Dr. No was made while the real portrait was still missing, so the film-makers gave their villain the stolen art for fun. Production designer Ken Adam painted the copy over a single weekend.

In which French city did Goya spend his final four years in self-imposed exile, dying there in 1828?

Bordeaux was home to a circle of his politically liberal friends. One of them described Goya arriving old, weak and without a word of French, yet content and eager to see the world.

Which noblewoman, long rumoured to be Goya's lover, points to the words "Solo Goya" in a 1797 portrait?

The Duchess of Alba also wears two rings in the picture, one engraved Alba and the other Goya. The word "solo", meaning only, lay hidden until the portrait was restored.

In which Aragonese city did Francisco Goya grow up and later help decorate the Basilica of the Pillar?

Zaragoza was the family home; Goya was born in a village some 40 kilometres away, where his parents had moved that year. At school he met Martín Zapater, the friend who received 131 of his letters.

Which animals did Goya draw in six plates of Los Caprichos to mock the stupidity of the learned professions?

Donkeys fill plates 37 to 42, a group nicknamed the Asnerias. In the last of them the roles are reversed: two labourers stagger along with the beasts riding on their backs.

In Goya's portrait of a small boy dressed in red, which pet bird holds the painter's calling card in its beak?

A magpie on a string carries the card, while three cats stare intently at the bird. The young sitter was about four, and the picture has hung in New York's Metropolitan Museum since 1949.

Whom did Goya place at the centre of his portrait of Charles IV's family, hinting at who really held power?

Queen Maria Luisa stands in the middle holding her youngest child's hand. The picture has sometimes been read as satire, though critics of that reading note that a painter who mocked the royal family would hardly have kept his post.

Goya's father's family, with roots in the village of Zerain, belonged to which people of northern Spain?

Basques by descent on his father's side, the painter grew up far from that homeland. His mother's family had pretensions to nobility, and their modest brick cottage bore a family crest.

Goya's The Burial of the Sardine shows a Madrid carnival that ends on which day of the church year?

Ash Wednesday closes the three-day carnival with a mock funeral for a sardine. Goya left the fish out entirely and made a darkly grinning carnival king his centrepiece instead.

Which toxic pigment, which Goya ground himself in huge amounts, is one suspected cause of his 1792 illness?

Lead white served him as both a canvas primer and a main colour. Other proposed culprits include viral encephalitis, a series of small strokes and Ménière's disease, and the question remains open.

Which king, restored in 1814, was painted by Goya for government ministries but never ordered a portrait himself?

Ferdinand VII and Goya were never on cordial terms, and the royal portraits were ordered by government ministries. The king's later crackdown on liberals helped push the painter to leave Spain.

Which actor played Francisco Goya in Miloš Forman's 2006 drama Goya's Ghosts, alongside Natalie Portman?

Stellan Skarsgård took the part, while Javier Bardem played a scheming churchman. Bardem admitted he first believed he should have been cast as Goya himself.

What was the trade of Francisco Goya's father, who helped ornament a great basilica during its rebuilding?

A gilder by trade, José Goya specialised in religious and decorative work, and one of the painter's brothers followed him into it. José's own father had been a notary.

When Goya's satirical prints Los Caprichos went on sale in 1799, what kind of Madrid business sold them?

A perfume shop that also sold liquor stocked the prints, in the building where Goya lived on Disillusion Street. He pulled them from sale after just fourteen days, with only 27 sets sold.

To keep his court salary when he left Spain in 1824, Goya formally asked for six months' leave to visit what?

A health spa at Plombières-les-Bains was the destination named in his request. He never went back to live in Spain, yet the leave let him keep his post and pay as court painter.

Which recently invented printing technique did Goya master in his late seventies while living in exile?

Lithography was still a relatively new medium when Goya first tried it in 1819. He worked with the stone set on his easel like a canvas, and his bold results looked nothing like the tidy prints of the day.

Goya's The Second of May 1808 shows Madrid's citizens attacking which mounted troops of the French Imperial Guard?

The Mamelukes were horsemen of Egyptian origin, and the crowd took them for Moors, which only sharpened its fury. The citizens in the picture fight back with little more than knives.

Which composer wrote the 1911 piano suite Goyescas, inspired by Goya, and later made it an opera?

Enrique Granados gave the first performance of the suite himself in Barcelona. One melody from it later became the basis of the Mexican standard Bésame Mucho.

Which Spanish prime minister, a former royal guardsman, probably commissioned Goya's The Naked Maja?

Manuel Godoy kept the picture in a private cabinet reserved for nudes, alongside a famous Venus by Velázquez. Goya also painted him in 1801 as a victorious general, after a brief war against Portugal.

What did Goya ask for when he gave the king the plates and unsold sets of Los Caprichos?

A pension for his son Javier was the price, and the deal put the risky plates safely in royal hands. Javier was the only one of Goya's seven children to survive into adulthood.

Which painting long credited to Goya did a Madrid museum reassign to a pupil in 2008, then return to him in 2021?

The Colossus shows a giant striding past a valley of fleeing people and cattle. Curators believed they had found a pupil's initials on it, a claim one leading Goya scholar dismissed as totally subjective.

While recovering from illness in 1793, Goya painted a set of small, dark cabinet pictures on which metal?

Tin plates carried eleven little pictures that nobody had commissioned. Goya said they let him occupy an imagination tormented by his sufferings, and one shows inmates brawling in an asylum yard.

Goya married Josefa, sister of which court painter whose backing helped him win his first royal commissions?

Francisco Bayeu, twelve years older and already established at court, taught Goya and then opened doors for him. Goya nicknamed his wife Pepa, and their marriage lasted almost forty years.