Sainte Lutgarde

By 1787 Goya had recently been named a painter to King Carlos III, and the dark, haunted work of his later years was still to come. That year the crown set him and his brother-in-law Ramón Bayeu to decorate a convent church in Valladolid, three large canvases each. This is Goya's Saint Lutgardis, a 13th-century nun who followed the teaching of Bernard of Clairvaux before joining a Cistercian house. He shows her in a glowing white habit, arms open, her face lifted toward a vision of Christ. That pale, softly lit figure looks back to an earlier Spanish master, Zurbarán, whose white-robed monks Goya would have known well.