La duchessa d'Alba e la beata

Two or three years before this, a sudden illness had left Francisco Goya completely deaf, and it changed how he painted, more private, quicker, stranger. In 1795 he was moving in the circle of Maria Cayetana de Silva, the Duchess of Alba, one of the richest and most talked-about women in Spain, and gossip has linked the two of them ever since. Instead of a grand court portrait, he painted this small, informal scene from inside her household. The young duchess, in white with a black bodice, reaches out laughing and dangles a red cord under the chin of her elderly maid, a woman nicknamed la Beata, the pious one. The old servant rears back in mock horror, rolling her eyes, waving a little wooden cross to fend the joke off. It is the kind of teasing you only see if you are let right into the house. Goya signed and dated it in the corner that same year.