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In 1771 Goya was 25 and in Italy on no one's money. He had won no scholarship, so he paid his way in Rome by turning out small, sellable canvases like this one. Nothing here yet points to the dark, haunted painter he would become. A priest tends a fire to Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, while young vestal virgins keep the sacred flame alive, and the whole thing glows with the soft Rococo colour that was the fashionable taste of the day. He borrowed the arrangement from painters he was studying in Rome. That same year he sent a canvas to a competition at the Academy in Parma, still signing himself a pupil.