Francisco Goya
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Francisco Goya trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Francisco de Goya began as a painter of cheerful scenes for the Spanish court and ended as the creator of some of the most disturbing images in Western art. In between came a mysterious illness, a brutal foreign occupation and a long struggle to say what he really thought without losing his position. This quiz gathers the fun facts behind the famous pictures: the nude that got him summoned to explain himself, the royal family he refused to flatter, the nightmares he painted in private for no one to see, and the strange adventures his work and even his remains had after his death. Every answer comes with a short explanation. The questions run from easy to hard, so they suit art students, museum-goers and anyone curious about the man often called the first modern painter.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Goya's farmhouse near Madrid was nicknamed for an earlier owner with which condition, one Goya shared?
Deafness
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.
Q 02When Francisco Goya's body was exhumed in France for reburial in Madrid, which part of him was missing?
His skull
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."
Q 03Which Roman god is said to be the wild-eyed figure eating his own child in one of Goya's Black Paintings?
Saturn
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.
Q 04Francisco Goya's portrait of which British commander was stolen from London's National Gallery in 1961?
The Duke of Wellington
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.
Q 05Gerald Holtom said the despairing peasant in Goya's The Third of May 1808 helped inspire which 1958 emblem?
The peace sign
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.
Q 06Francisco Goya painted a twin of The Naked Maja showing the same woman in the same pose; what differs?
She is clothed
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.
Q 07What object on the ground lights the victims of the French firing squad in Goya's The Third of May 1808?
A lantern
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.
Q 08Spain's Goya Awards, whose trophy is a bronze bust of the painter, honour the best in which art form?
Cinema
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.
Q 09In 1930 Spain caused an international scandal by printing Goya's The Naked Maja on what everyday item?
Postage stamps
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.
Q 10On which surface did Goya paint his fourteen Black Paintings, never meaning anyone to see them?
Plaster walls
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.
Q 11Which Madrid museum holds more works by Goya than by any other artist, including his Black Paintings?
The Prado
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.
Q 12Goya's The Disasters of War prints record atrocities from Spain's struggle against which invading ruler?
Napoleon
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.
Q 13One of Goya's Black Paintings shows only the head of which animal, gazing up into a vast empty space?
A dog
Q 21Which Spanish artist's 1951 Massacre in Korea restages the firing squad of Goya's The Third of May 1808?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 22The 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
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.
Q 23Twice turned down by Madrid's Royal Academy, the young Goya paid his own way to study art in which country?
Italy
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.
Q 14Which spectacle did Goya depict in 33 prints published in 1816, having once painted himself dressed for it?
Bullfighting
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.
Q 15In Goya's Witches' Sabbath paintings, the Devil presides over the coven in the shape of which animal?
A goat
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.
Q 16Which Church body seized Goya's The Naked Maja as obscene and summoned the painter to explain himself?
The Inquisition
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.
Q 17Goya's 1820 self-portrait shows him held up in bed by which person, thanked for saving his life?
His doctor
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.
Q 18In Goya's etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, which creatures swarm around the sleeping artist?
Owls and bats
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.
Q 19Francisco Goya's sunny early paintings such as The Parasol were made as full-size designs for what?
Tapestries
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.
Q 20Which Velázquez masterpiece did Goya echo by painting himself at an easel behind Charles IV's family?
Las Meninas
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.
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.
Q 24Francisco Goya is often described as the first of the moderns and the last of which group of painters?
The Old Masters
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.
Q 25Francisco Goya's tomb lies in a small Madrid chapel whose dome is decorated with what?
His own frescoes
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.
Q 26A crater named after Goya lies on which world, where craters honour artists and writers?
Mercury
Mercury is where most craters take the names of famous writers, artists and composers. Astronomers adopted Goya's name for this one in 1976.
Q 27Goya's The Second of May 1808 was torn when a truck evacuating Madrid's art crashed during which Spanish conflict?
The Civil War
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.
Q 28A copy of a Goya portrait stolen in London hangs in the villain's lair in which James Bond film?
Dr. No
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.
Q 29In which French city did Goya spend his final four years in self-imposed exile, dying there in 1828?
Bordeaux
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.
Q 30Which noblewoman, long rumoured to be Goya's lover, points to the words "Solo Goya" in a 1797 portrait?
The Duchess of Alba
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.