La Messe des relevailles

This small church interior came to the museum in Agen in 1900, left by a former French ambassador to Spain, and it has carried Goya's name ever since, though not without argument. It shows a relevailles, the old churching rite in which a mother was blessed in the weeks after giving birth. She kneels with a tall candle near the altar while a shaft of light drops from an unseen opening overhead. Scholars have gone back and forth on it. Some read Goya's hand in the play of light and shadow. Others note the figures lack the sharp specificity of his sure small works, and point to a related, more finished version in Madrid. X-rays add a twist. Underneath lies an older Flemish scene of elegant company, painted over and reused. Whoever held the brush worked in Spain in Goya's own years, the light doing most of the telling.