Saint Ambrose

In 1767 Spain expelled the Jesuits, and in the shake-up that followed many reform-minded clergy looked back to the first centuries of the Church for their models. Goya's Saint Ambrose, painted around 1796 to 1799, most likely comes out of that climate. It is one of four canvases of the Latin Fathers of the Church, the early theologians Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Gregory. Ambrose was bishop of Milan in the fourth century, and Goya shows him seated in a white cope and mitre, writing in a large open book, his eyes turned upward. We see him from below, which suggests the canvas was meant to hang high on the wall of a church or religious house, yet nobody knows which one. Before the Cleveland Museum of Art bought it in 1969, it belonged to the Italian collector Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi in Florence.