The Legend of Goya Meeting Comodín and Creating The Naked Maja

The legend of Goya meeting Comodín and creating The Naked Maja is José’s explanation for the painting’s divided identity: its face belongs to Ana María Maya, while its nude body belongs to another woman. It turns a visual puzzle into a story of concealment, linking the portrait’s uncanny likeness to a mysterious image Comodín carried and to the danger a living Roma model might have faced in Goya’s time.

The Encounter in Sanlúcar

José places the meeting in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, in the spring of 1797. Goya, already finishing The Naked Maja, encounters a small jester and tries to take him by force to his studio so that he can paint his portrait. The encounter recalls the courtly world of the seventeenth-century painter Velázquez, Goya’s great artistic model, who had painted dwarfs and jesters; but here the familiar artist’s subject resists being turned into an image.

The jester shouts and protests, but Goya is profoundly deaf and does not hear him. The imbalance between the powerful painter and the small man seems about to decide the scene in Goya’s favor. Instead, Comodín brings out a mysterious portrait of Ana María Maya. Goya has never seen anything like it, and the image changes the encounter: he releases the jester.

How the Painting Acquires Ana’s Face

In José’s account, Goya is then completing The Naked Maja. He paints Ana’s face onto the nude figure, hiding the true identity of the woman whose body served as the model. The story makes the painting a composite rather than a straightforward portrait: the face and hair belong to Ana, but the body does not. Its apparent unity conceals the division that the legend makes central.

Frank later studies The Naked Maja beside The Clothed Maja. At first the clothed version seems to have been painted more hastily and with less detail; its woman appears more swollen and more heavily made up. Frank considers whether Goya hurried to produce a clothed counterpart to cover the nude. Looking more carefully, however, he recognizes that the two figures are the same woman only in their head, face, and hair. Ana is present in both paintings, but only from the neck up.

The distinction becomes especially visible in the nude painting. Frank describes the effect as though Ana’s head had been transplanted onto the naked model’s body. This visual reading does not establish the legend as historical fact, but it gives the story a concrete basis within the novel: the compositional separation between face and body looks like the trace of the very act José describes.

The Cost of Being Recognized

José says that being identified with the woman in the old painting was never easy for Ana and could become a burden. The likeness that makes her extraordinary also exposes her to a history she did not choose. In the story, the painting’s split identity offers a reason for that difficult recognition: Ana’s face is unmistakable, yet the body displayed alongside it is someone else’s.

The legend also places the original model in danger. José observes that a Roma woman who had allowed herself to be painted nude in Goya’s time risked losing her life. Concealing her identity is therefore more than an artistic device in his telling. By substituting Ana’s face while disguising the model through the painting’s composite form, Goya’s act becomes bound up with the peril of exposure and the difference between a public image and the person represented.

Oral Tradition and the Limits of Proof

Frank asks whether a Roma tradition really tells the story of Goya and the dwarf with the mysterious portrait. José shakes his head. The stories he knows do not confirm that meeting or describe Goya painting Ana’s face onto the nude. They tell instead that the jester with the bells was at the wharf in Cádiz when the Spanish brig Ana departed, and that he showed people a portrait of a woman rendered with such lifelike detail that they fell silent in astonishment.

One of those present, José says, was the young Antonio, who would later become Ana’s great-great-grandfather. The detail gives the portrait a family history and connects the image to Ana’s ancestry, but José distinguishes that inherited story from what can be established. The portrait, he says, was already in Seville in 1790—several years before Goya painted his Roma woman or nude maja. For José, that chronology is enough to make the tradition meaningful, even though it does not verify the later meeting or the painting’s creation as he has narrated them.

A Legend Held Between Image and History

The account works through a tension between what the paintings seem to show and what tradition can actually attest. Frank’s close inspection finds a face-and-body division that resembles José’s explanation; the oral story supplies an earlier portrait and a chain of family memory; yet José openly concedes that the sources do not establish the decisive episode. The legend’s force rests not on proof but on the fit between the painting’s uncanny appearance and the story that explains it.

Its central image is one of concealment that cannot quite conceal. The model’s body remains in the painting, Ana’s face gives it a recognizable identity, and the careful viewer can see that the two do not belong to the same woman. In José’s version, Goya’s art preserves that contradiction: the public masterpiece hides a model, while its visible face makes another woman’s presence impossible to ignore.