Death of Saint Albert of Jerusalem

When this small night scene was painted, around 1772, Goya was in his mid-twenties, freshly home in Aragon after a stretch in Italy and still years from the court painter he would become. It is attributed to those early seasons, and it comes down to us paired with a Flight into Egypt from the same source. The subject is a medieval killing. Albert of Jerusalem was the bishop who wrote the first rule of life for the Carmelite order. In 1214, at Acre in the Holy Land, he was stabbed by a man he had disciplined and stripped of office. Goya sets the moment in near-darkness, the figures drawn out of shadow by the low, raking light he had been studying in Italian painting. The quickly sketched hands in the background are already his. In these same years he was painting frescoes for the Charterhouse of Aula Dei, just outside Zaragoza.