Goya

Goya’s role in the narrative rests on a divided image: the paintings La maja desnuda and La maja vestida appear to show the same woman, yet the face belongs to Ana María Maya while the nude body belongs to another model. José’s account links that artistic construction to Goya’s encounter with Comodín, a small jester carrying a mysterious portrait of Ana, and to the danger a living Roma woman would have faced as a nude model in his time.

The Two Majas and Ana’s Face

While examining the paintings, the narrator is urged to look more closely rather than judge them as identical. La maja vestida seems more hurriedly painted and less detailed than its nude counterpart; its woman appears more swollen and more heavily made up. The narrator recalls that the nude version was painted first and considers whether Goya hurriedly made a clothed equivalent to cover it.

A closer look yields the crucial distinction: both paintings show the same face, but only the head, face, and hair belong to Ana. The woman’s head and body seem divided into separate parts, a division most apparent in La maja desnuda. The narrator sees Ana’s face not as belonging to the nude model’s body, but as if it had been transplanted onto it. This recognition supplies the concealed identity at the center of José’s explanation: the paintings do not portray Ana’s body, even though they carry her likeness.

Goya and the Duchess of Alba

José also places Goya in the historical setting of his relationship with the Duchess of Alba. Between 1796 and 1797, around the time La maja desnuda was painted, Goya lived at her country house in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. A persistent rumor arose in the early nineteenth century that she had modeled for the nude painting. José suggests that the rumor may have rested on firsthand knowledge, though it does not establish the model’s identity.

The Duchess’s other portraits do not rule out the possibility that she posed for La maja desnuda. José cites a famous 1797 portrait and a drawing of her dressing her hair, dated to 1796 or 1797. Whether she and Goya were lovers is left unresolved. A 1795 letter records that she visited his studio to have him apply her makeup; Goya added that this pleased him more than painting her on canvas. In an oil painting made at Sanlúcar, she wears black and a mantilla, two rings inscribed “Alba-Goya,” and points authoritatively toward the words “Sólo Goya” engraved in the sandy ground. She was a beautiful and attractive woman, and became a widow when the Duke of Alba died in Seville on 9 June 1796.

The Encounter with Comodín

José’s embedded story gives another account of how Ana’s image entered Goya’s work. Goya’s great artistic idol was Velázquez, the seventeenth-century Sevillian painter who became court painter to Philip IV and painted many dwarfs and jesters, figures common at court in his time. In the spring of 1797, Goya encountered a small jester in Sanlúcar de Barrameda and tried to force him to come to the studio to be portrayed.

The jester shouted and protested, but Goya was profoundly deaf and did not hear him. The encounter changed when the little man produced the mysterious portrait of Ana María Maya: Goya released him, astonished by what he saw. According to José, Goya was then finishing La maja desnuda, and painted Ana’s face over the naked figure in order to conceal the model’s true identity.

Concealment, Risk, and Narrative Significance

The account makes the paintings’ split between face and body an act of concealment as well as an artistic puzzle. Ana’s recognizable face is preserved, while her body is not the one represented; the image can therefore suggest her identity without exposing her as the nude model. José explains the danger behind that distinction: a Roma woman who allowed herself to be painted naked in Goya’s era risked losing her life. He adds that being identified with the old painting was never easy for Ana and could become a genuine burden.

Goya is thus connected to two competing claims about the model: the long-standing rumor about the Duchess of Alba and José’s account of Ana’s face being placed over another woman’s body. The first remains uncertain; the second is offered as the explanation for the paintings’ divided likeness. Their contrast makes the portraits more than paired depictions of a maja: in the narrative, they become a means of hiding a vulnerable woman’s identity in plain sight.