Francisco de Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son directly onto the dining-room wall of his country house, the Quinta del Sordo, outside Madrid in 1819-1823. It was one of fourteen 'Black Paintings' Goya made on the interior walls of the house in the last four years of his Spanish residency. He never signed them, never titled them, never exhibited them, and almost certainly never intended anyone outside his immediate household to see them.

Francisco de Goya painted two pictures of the same reclining woman on the same green couch in the same Madrid year — La Maja Desnuda (c. 1797-1800) and La Maja Vestida (c. 1800-05). The two paintings are the first un-mythological reclining nude in the European canon since classical antiquity. They hung in the private cabinet of the Spanish Prime Minister Manuel Godoy on a sliding mechanism that let visitors see either the clothed version or the naked one underneath at the pul

In 1937 Theodor Adorno coined the term Spätstil — late style — for the paintings, drawings, and music a great artist makes in the last decade of life, when the rules they had spent half a century mastering begin to dissolve. A reading of five painters working in old age: Rembrandt's last self-portraits, Goya's late self-image, Hokusai's eighty-eighth year, Cézanne's final Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Monet's water lilies at the Orangerie.

Francisco Goya worked through fifty years of Spanish history, from cheerful tapestry cartoons for the royal palace in 1777 to the Black Paintings he applied directly to the walls of his country house in 1820. Across the same career he was court painter to four successive kings, a witness to the French invasion, a publisher of satirical etchings, a portraitist of the most fashionable women in Madrid, and the inventor of the modern picture of fear.

Francisco Goya's Witches' Sabbath, painted in 1798 for the Duchess of Osuna, shows a circle of women offering their newborn babies to a crowned he-goat under a thin moon. The picture is one of six small witch panels Goya produced in the same year — the same year as the Caprichos etchings — and the moment his work shifts from court portraitist to investigator of fear, ignorance, and the Spanish dark.

From El Greco's compressed cosmos in late-sixteenth-century Toledo to Antoni Tàpies's matter paintings in late-twentieth-century Barcelona, ten Spanish painters built the visual vocabulary the rest of Europe and the Americas borrowed from. The decisions each one made, and the line between them.

Guernica is the most famous anti-war painting of the twentieth century — but it is also a specific argument, built piece by piece out of a visual grammar Goya invented in 1814. The bull, the horse, the lit lamp, the screaming mother, the broken sword. What each part of Guernica says, and the line of paintings that taught Picasso how to say it.

Before Goya, European painters showed war as triumph. After Goya, they could no longer pretend. The Third of May 1808 ended the heroic battle picture and invented the painting of senseless violence — a tradition that runs through Manet, Picasso, and every photograph of war we have made since.

Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son between 1819 and 1823, in oil applied directly to the plaster wall of the dining room of his house outside Madrid. He was in his seventies, deaf for thirty years, recovering from a near-fatal illness, and living alone in a country property called the Quinta del Sordo — the House of the Deaf Man. He did not sign the painting. He did not title it. He did not intend it to be seen. Saturn is one of fourteen pictures Goya painted on

Searching for Francisco Goya's The Coven? This is the painting: a Black Painting from 1821-1823, a Devil in goat form presiding over a circle of witches, painted directly onto Goya's own dining-room wall. What the painting shows, why he painted it, and how to bring the fine print home.

A man in a white shirt throws his arms wide before a firing squad on a hill above Madrid. Goya painted the night six years after it happened — and built every modern war painting that came after.

Two Witches' Sabbath paintings, twenty-five years apart. How Francisco Goya used the supernatural to attack the very institutions that fed it.