La Sacra Famiglia con san Gioacchino e sant'Anna davanti alla gloria eterna

This is Goya long before the Goya most people picture, with no royal portraits and none of the dark, haunted late work, just a young provincial painter in his early twenties around 1769, still learning his trade in Aragon before he ever reached Madrid or Rome. The subject was a conventional one for the time, the Holy Family together with Mary's parents, Saint Anne and Saint Joachim, gazing upward while God the Father and the dove of the Holy Spirit appear in glory above. Spanish painters called this gathering of three generations by exactly that name. The picture only surfaced in 1970, discovered among a private family's belongings, which is part of why scholars still argue over its date. Within about a decade he would be designing tapestry cartoons for the royal factory in Madrid, and the transformation would start there.