La Visite du moine

In February 1798 a Madrid court tried María Vicenta Mendieta, a woman in her early thirties, for helping her younger lover murder her husband. Both were executed that April in the Plaza Mayor, and the case gripped the city. Goya almost certainly knew its every turn, since a close friend of his served as the prosecutor. Around 1808 he made a set of small canvases retelling the affair, and this is the moment just before the killing. María Vicenta stands elegantly dressed among her maids, receiving a man in a monk's habit who is really her lover, arrived in disguise. Goya painted 11 of these scenes in all, and sold the whole series to a single collector from Mallorca.