Santo Inácio de Loyola

When Goya painted the founder of the Jesuit order in 1780, the Jesuits had just been driven out of Spain. King Charles III expelled them in 1767, and the Pope suppressed the whole order a few years later, so by the time of this picture the Society of Jesus barely existed as an institution. That gives a quiet charge to the image. Goya shows Ignatius of Loyola in the plain black habit, holding a book open to the order's motto, 'For the greater glory of God', with its emblem tucked into a corner. Goya was in his mid-30s here, still years from becoming the king's painter, and the work seems to have been a private commission from a family whose son shared the saint's name. It stayed in that family's hands for roughly two centuries.