Asmodeia

Goya bought a country house outside Madrid in 1819, when he was in his seventies, deaf, and had lived through the French occupation of Spain. On its walls, for no patron and no sale, he painted 14 dark scenes straight onto the plaster. This is one of them. Two figures float in the air over a wide landscape, a woman in a rose-coloured robe and a man beside her, both looking frightened, he pointing towards a town on a distant mountain. Down in the corner a file of soldiers takes aim, the same French muskets Goya had already painted in the executions of the Third of May. Goya gave the picture no title. The name Asmodea, after a demon from the Book of Tobit, was added later by a friend. The murals were cut from the walls decades after his death and moved to canvas, which is how they now hang in the Prado.