神の名の礼拝

Goya was about 26 and freshly back from a year in Italy when the canons of this basilica in Zaragoza handed him a ceiling. It was his first real commission of any size, and he treated it as an audition. He had to paint the adoration of the name of God across a small choir vault, and he built it from banks of cloud seen at different angles so the eye is pulled up toward the glowing triangle at the center. There is none of the darkness people know from his later work here. This is the ambitious local boy showing the church that the fresco techniques he had studied in Rome could hold their own on home ground. Within a decade he would be painting for the king in Madrid.