An Autopsy

Simonet painted this in Rome, where he was a first-year pensioner of the Spanish Academy, and what the Academy asked of its pensioners in that first year was a study of the nude. He wrote to his father in January 1890 that he was at work on an autopsy of the heart, and again at the end of April that he was going to the hospital one last time to make a study from the dead model. He handed the canvas in on 1 May to Vicente Palmaroli, the painter who ran the Academy in Rome. The pensioners' work reached Madrid too late for the national exhibition that year and went on show in June in the upper rooms of the Academy of San Fernando, where the critic Ceferino Araujo called the subject repulsive and the young Antonio Cánovas y Vallejo defended it. The title everyone knows it by, ¡Y tenía corazón!, and she had a heart, is not Simonet's. The Prado, which owns the picture and keeps it on long deposit at the Museo de Málaga, records that as the most repeated of its spurious titles.