Alegoría del amor, Cupido y Psique

The museum itself isn't certain who these two lovers are, though the pair is usually read as Cupid and Psyche from an old Roman tale, the god of love visiting a mortal woman by night. Goya painted it around 1798. By then he was deaf, following the illness that had cost his hearing a few years earlier, and he was the leading painter at the Spanish court with the run of the royal collection. That mattered here. The tangled, reclining pose closely echoes a Titian he would have known well from those rooms. He works the scene in warm, dim light, the near-naked bodies emerging softly and the faces half lost in shadow.