The Ecstasy of Saint Anthony Abbot

Goya painted this in 1771, the year he came home to Aragon from a long study trip to Italy. He was about 25, still unknown, and taking whatever religious commissions the region offered, decades before he would become painter to the Spanish king. Nothing here yet hints at the black, haunted pictures of his old age. It is a small, conventional devotional scene of the desert hermit Anthony caught up in a vision, painted in the warm Italian manner he had just absorbed. That same year he won his first real break in Zaragoza, a fresco for the great basilica of the Pilar, and the local career that would carry him toward Madrid began.