Il tribunale dell'Inquisizione

Goya painted this small panel of an Inquisition trial in the years around 1812, when Spain was torn between the reforms that had briefly arrived with Napoleon's occupation and the return of the old order under Ferdinand VII. Goya sided then with the liberals, and the Inquisition was one of the institutions they wanted gone. He shows an auto-da-fé, a public judgment of faith, staged inside a church. The accused sit slumped and exposed on a raised bench, made to wear the tall pointed caps and the painted penitential robes that spelled out their offences to the crowd. It belongs with a small group of scenes he painted of the customs he thought Spain should abandon, a madhouse, a procession of flagellants, a bullfight. The condemned figures in their conical hats sit a full head above everyone around them.