Cristo crucificado

In May 1780 Goya was still an ambitious provincial painter angling for a foothold in Madrid, and this crucifixion was his ticket in. He submitted it to the Royal Academy of San Fernando as his reception piece, and it earned him the rank of academician. So it is a young man on his best behaviour, painting exactly by the rules the Spanish theorist Francisco Pacheco had set down more than a century earlier. Four nails instead of three, the feet resting on a small block, the Latin inscription across the top, and that flat black void behind the figure, borrowed straight from Velázquez. Goya leans hard on the two Spanish masters the academy admired most, Velázquez and the court painter Mengs. The face turned up to a light with no visible source is about the only thing here that hints at the darker, stranger painter Goya would later become.