Apparition of the Virgin of Pilar to Santiago and his disciples

This is early Goya, painted around 1768 when he was in his early twenties and still working in Zaragoza under his first teacher. Almost nothing survives from these training years, which makes the panel unusual. It shows a legend the city held dear: the Virgin Mary appearing to the apostle James on a pillar, said to have happened in Roman Zaragoza to steady him as he preached. Years later Goya would paint the same subject in fresco inside the great basilica of the Pilar itself. The colours here are still soft and the handling careful, far from the darkness of his later work. In 1996 the panel was carried to Fuendetodos, the village where he was born, the only painting by Goya ever brought there.