The story
Around 1800 Francisco de Goya, just made First Court Painter, painted a full-length portrait of Joaquín Company, a Franciscan friar who had been Archbishop of Zaragoza for three years and was leaving to become Archbishop of Valencia. Company stands in plain clerical dress against an empty background, his shadow the only thing on the floor, holding a sheet of paper with Goya's name on it. The painting belongs to the Archdiocese and hangs in the Alma Mater Museum, beside the cathedral of La Seo.
The museum opened in March 2011 in the oldest part of the archbishop's palace, built on ground once occupied by the forum of Roman Caesaraugusta. From the 12th century the palace housed archbishops and, at times, the kings of Aragon, and the building is as much a part of the visit as the objects. There is a 15th-century Gothic chapel where the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, prayed, and a 14th-century Mudéjar ceiling, the Moorish-style woodwork of Christian Spain, from the reign of Peter IV of Aragon. In one of the palace rooms their eldest daughter, Isabella of Aragon, died in childbirth in 1498.
The collection follows the diocese across a thousand years. There are Romanesque capitals from the old church of Santiago, a large group of Aragonese Gothic paintings, Renaissance silverwork, and pictures by Francisco Bayeu, the court painter who was Goya's brother-in-law and early master.
