Maja et Celestina au balcon

A pretty young woman leans at a balcony rail, and just behind her, half in shadow, sits an old woman wrapped in black. That older figure is a celestina, the Spanish word for a procuress or go-between, named after the scheming old bawd of a famous 15th-century play. So the scene is not simply charming. The young maja is being offered, and the old woman is doing the offering. Goya painted a pair of these balcony pictures around 1808 to 1812, in the violent years when Napoleon's armies occupied Spain and his own world was darkening. The painting stayed in the family. It turns up in the inventory drawn up in 1812, when his belongings were divided after his wife died.