Saint Barbara

This is early Goya, painted around 1772 when he was still in his twenties, working in his home region of Aragon years before the royal court and the dark late work. He had recently come back from a trip to Italy, and it shows. Saint Barbara stands calm and monumental, like a piece of classical sculpture, holding the martyr's palm in one hand and wearing the crown her legend gives a nobleman's daughter. The cloth is laid on thick and bright. Behind her on the right the tower burns, the one her father shut her in, and in which she cut three windows for the Trinity. The museum dates the picture from two preparatory drawings in his Italian sketchbook, which place it just after he came home in 1771, and that makes it the earliest Goya the Prado owns.