Saint Bernard de Clairvaux guérissant un infirme

This is Goya before the Goya most people picture, years before the black paintings and the war scenes, still a correct and ambitious court painter climbing the official ladder. In 1787 he took a church commission in Valladolid, part of a set of altar canvases for a convent being rebuilt under Charles III, the work shared between Goya and his brother-in-law Ramón Bayeu. The scene is a medieval miracle. Bernard of Clairvaux, a 12th-century monk, heals a lame man after giving bread and water to the poor. Everything about it is calm and academic, nearer to the older Spanish master Zurbarán than to anything we now call Goyaesque. The canvases still hang in that same Valladolid convent today, where the nuns received them.