Aesop and Menippus

In 1778 Goya was 32, newly settled in Madrid, designing cartoons for the royal tapestry works and, more usefully for him, allowed into the royal collection to copy. That summer he advertised in the Madrid gazette a set of etchings he had made after Velazquez. These two small canvases come out of the same effort. They reduce Velazquez's Aesop and Menippus, the Greek fabulist and the cynic philosopher, painted around 1640 as two shabby men in cloaks for a royal hunting lodge in the woods outside Madrid and hanging by Goya's day in the palace itself. Each of the copies stands about 43 centimetres high, roughly a quarter the height of the originals. The foundation that catalogues Goya's work lists the pair as attributed rather than certain, while the museum in Zaragoza that owns them gives them to him outright.