Scena notturna dell'Inquisizione

When Goya painted this small panel around 1810, the Spanish Inquisition had just been abolished by decree of Joseph Bonaparte, the king Napoleon had installed in Madrid. Ferdinand VII brought it back four years later. Goya made the picture for himself rather than for a buyer, one of a small group of such works, and the figures in white robes are condemned prisoners being led out, most likely to the place of execution. For a long time nobody could prove the painting was his. It is unsigned, small and sketchy, and specialists argued over it for decades, until a restorer in 1960 removed the later coatings and found the inscriptions X.9 and G. X.9 underneath, the marks used when Goya's estate was inventoried in 1812. Most experts now accept it. Six pictures carry those marks, and four of them belong together as a series.