Atropos

Goya never meant anyone to see this. Around 1819, deaf, ill and withdrawn from the world, he bought a farmhouse outside Madrid known as the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man, and painted straight onto its interior walls in dark, private images now called the Black Paintings. This one shows the three Fates of ancient myth, who spin and cut the thread of every human life, drifting through the air over a dim landscape. Atropos, the one who cuts, holds the scissors. Beside her a Fate peers through a lens, and another cradles what looks like a newborn where the spindle should be. A bound figure sits helpless among them. Only in 1873, decades after Goya's death, were these murals carefully lifted off the plaster and transferred to canvas, which is how they reached the Prado.