Assumption of the Virgin Mary and Saint Íñigo

This altarpiece hangs in a church in Calatayud, in the Aragon region where Francisco Goya grew up, and it is one of those works catalogued as attributed rather than certain. If the traditional date near 1760 is right, Goya would have been a boy of about 14, only starting out in a provincial workshop, decades before the court portraits and the dark late visions that made his name. It shows the Virgin carried up to heaven, watched over by Saint Inigo, a holy figure tied to Calatayud itself. Whether the young Goya truly painted it, or a workshop hand around him did, scholars have never fully settled. It is the kind of ordinary devotional commission that filled an Aragonese painter's early years, long before anyone thought his beginnings worth arguing over.