Inquisition

The Inquisition appears as a historical power whose reach extends from the display of Goya’s two maja paintings to the secrecy surrounding Ana’s family traditions. In José’s account, it is not merely a distant institution: its pressure helps explain both an artist’s strategies of presentation and a family’s long practice of keeping knowledge hidden.

Influence on the Two Paintings

José observes that the two paintings hung in Godoy’s palace and suggests that Godoy, like Goya, had to take the Inquisition into account. He considers the possibility that La maja vestida was painted to hang over La maja desnuda, concealing the nude image from view. He also recounts evidence for a more playful arrangement: the clothed painting might have appeared first, then turned by a mechanism to reveal the nude beneath it. In either version, the paintings’ presentation reflects the need to negotiate the Inquisition’s scrutiny.

Pressure on Andalusian Roma Traditions

José places the Inquisition within a much longer history of danger for Andalusian Roma communities. He says that for extended periods they had to hide underground to escape it, and connects that persecution to the family’s enduring capacity for secrecy. After becoming, in his own words, an adopted son-in-law in Ana’s tradition-conscious family, he abandoned his television series as he learned too much about its esoteric traditions to treat them as material for a program about his own family.

Family Legend and Narrative Significance

The family story José introduces reaches back to El Planeta and is also associated with the death of Ana’s great-grandfather after a fight in 1894. He presents the legend as a possible means of understanding what happened to Ana, while stressing that it had already cast a shadow over her life. The Inquisition thus connects historical persecution to the family’s guarded inheritance: secrecy is both a response to past danger and the condition under which a troubling story continues across generations.