Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga

Goya painted this in 1787 for the Count of Altamira, and the sitter is the count's youngest son, Manuel, a small boy in a brilliant red suit standing against a dark ground. He holds a string, and on the end of it is a pet magpie carrying Goya's own calling card in its beak, the painter's signature hidden in plain sight. To one side hangs a cage of finches. To the other, three cats have gone very still, eyes fixed on the bird. It reads at first as a charming child's portrait, but that ring of caged and hunting animals was a familiar language for the fragility of innocence. Manuel did not grow up. He died at the age of eight, a few years after Goya finished this.