Goya's Naked Maja and Clothed Maja: The Pair of Paintings That Hung on a Sliding Mechanism in a Madrid Closet
Updated: Sep 5
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes painted two pictures of the same reclining woman on the same green velvet couch in Madrid between approximately 1797 and 1805. They are identically composed — same model, same pose (right arm folded behind the head, left hand resting on the stomach, body in three-quarter view from the lower-left, head turned to look directly at the viewer), same couch, same wall behind, same lighting from a notional window at the upper left. They differ in one detail. In one canvas, La Maja Desnuda (The Naked Maja, c. 1797-1800), the woman is fully nude. In the other, La Maja Vestida (The Clothed Maja, c. 1800-05), she is dressed in a tight short jacket and silk trousers of the costume Madrid working-class women called the maja wore in the late eighteenth century. The two paintings are oil on canvas and about ninety-seven by one hundred and ninety centimetres each — a near-identical horizontal format. They hung in the private cabinet of the Spanish Prime Minister Manuel Godoy in Madrid from approximately 1803 to 1808 on a specially built sliding mechanism that let visitors see either the clothed version or the naked one underneath at the pull of a cord.
The first un-mythological reclining nude since antiquity
The Maja Desnuda is, in art-historical terms, the first un-mythological reclining female nude in the European canon since classical antiquity. The reclining-nude format had been a standard subject of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting for almost three centuries by the time Goya painted his version — Giorgione's Sleeping Venus of about 1510, Titian's Venus of Urbino of 1538, Velázquez's Rokeby Venus of about 1647, Boucher's Reclining Girl of 1751 — but every previous canonical example had defended the picture's nudity by attaching it to a mythological subject. The naked woman was Venus, or Diana, or a nymph, or a sleeping classical goddess; the viewer was looking at the goddess and the eroticism was an incidental feature of the encounter with a deity. Goya removed the mythological cover. The Maja Desnuda is just a Madrid woman lying on a Madrid couch in a Madrid bedroom looking directly at the viewer. There is no goddess. There is no narrative. There is no allegorical fig-leaf. The picture is the first European painting in modern times to present a contemporary woman naked simply because the painter and the patron wanted to look at her.
The Spanish Inquisition was still in operation in 1797, with jurisdiction over moral offences including obscenity. The Maja Desnuda would have been illegal to display publicly in Madrid at the time it was painted; it could legally be commissioned, owned, and displayed only in a private cabinet visible only to invited visitors. The convention had been used by Spanish nobility for two centuries to maintain private collections of nude paintings — Philip IV had a similar private cabinet at the Alcázar, including Titian's nudes — but it required the cabinet to be physically separated from the public spaces of the house. Manuel Godoy, the patron of the Goya pair, was the chief minister of the Bourbon court under Charles IV and the most powerful man in Spain after the king; his Madrid palace at the corner of the Plaza de la Marina Española had a private cabinet on the second floor, accessible only by a separate spiral staircase, where the Maja paintings hung together with several other nudes (including a presumed lost Velázquez Venus). The sliding mechanism — covered records describe it as a wooden panel set in grooves above the canvas, with the Clothed Maja mounted face-out on the front and the Naked Maja mounted face-out on a parallel canvas behind, the two separated by about three centimetres of clearance — let a visitor pull a cord and shift the Clothed canvas to one side, revealing the Naked canvas behind. The mechanism is one of the most ingenious display devices in eighteenth-century European art.
Manuel Godoy, the chief minister, and the 1808 fall
Manuel de Godoy y Álvarez de Faria (1767-1851) was the most controversial figure in late-Bourbon Spanish politics. He was a junior provincial nobleman from Extremadura who arrived at the Madrid court at twenty in 1787 as a guards officer, became the personal favourite of Queen María Luisa within two years, was made chief minister of Spain in 1792 at the age of twenty-five, and effectively ran the Spanish state for the next sixteen years as the principal Bourbon government policy-maker. He was widely (though never publicly confirmed) understood at court to be the queen's lover and the father of at least one of her children. He commissioned the two Goya Majas at some point during the late 1790s as part of a larger private collection of nudes that he assembled at his Madrid palace in the years 1798-1803. The two paintings are first documented together in the inventory taken at the palace in late 1808.
The political collapse came in March 1808 when the Bourbon government failed to manage the French occupation of Spain. Napoleon's army had been moving through northern Spain since November 1807 under the pretext of a joint Franco-Spanish operation against Portugal; in February 1808 the French troops occupied Madrid; in March a riot in the town of Aranjuez forced Charles IV to dismiss Godoy and abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand VII; in May the entire Bourbon family was forced to abdicate at Bayonne and Napoleon installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne. Godoy fled with the royal family to Bayonne and then to Rome, where he would live in exile for forty-three years until his death in 1851. His Madrid palace was sacked in March 1808; its contents were inventoried by the French occupation administration; the inventory records the two Goya Majas as the most controversial single objects in the collection. The paintings were confiscated to a state warehouse, then handed over to the Spanish Inquisition in 1814 after the post-Napoleonic restoration of the Bourbon dynasty.
The 1815 Inquisition trial
In March 1815 the Spanish Inquisition, restored to its full pre-Napoleonic authority by the returning Ferdinand VII, opened a formal trial against Goya for the obscenity of the Maja Desnuda. Goya was sixty-nine, partly deaf since the 1793 illness that had ended his court career as a portraitist, and still officially the first painter of the Spanish royal court (the title had been formally restored to him by Ferdinand in 1814 despite Goya's brief service to the Napoleonic Joseph Bonaparte regime in 1808-13). The trial was held at the Inquisition's tribunal on the Calle de los Premostratenses in Madrid. The charges were obscenity, profanation of religious paintings (the painting had been seized from a state collection that included religious works), and conspiracy to corrupt public morals. The penalty on conviction would have been excommunication, confiscation of all property, and possible imprisonment.
Goya was called to testify on 26 March 1815. The Inquisition asked him to identify the model of the Maja Desnuda and to confirm or deny the rumour, circulating in Madrid since the paintings had first been displayed in Godoy's cabinet, that the model was either the Duchess of Alba (Goya's reported lover in the late 1790s and the subject of several other Goya portraits) or Pepita Tudó, Godoy's young Madrid mistress. Goya refused to identify the model. He said he had used a paid Madrid model whose name he could not now recall. The Inquisition pressed; Goya repeated the answer; the Inquisition asked again on 22 May 1815 in a second hearing; Goya repeated the answer a third time. The case was eventually dropped — partly because Ferdinand VII had reasons of his own for not wanting an Inquisition spectacle around his court painter, partly because the Inquisition could not prove that the model was a specific Madrid woman without the painter's confirmation. The two paintings were returned to Goya in late 1815. He kept them in his Madrid studio for the next four years.
Who was the maja?
The identity of the model has been the subject of approximately two hundred years of Spanish art-historical speculation. Two main candidates have dominated the literature. The first is María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva, the thirteenth Duchess of Alba (1762-1802), the leading Spanish noblewoman of her generation, a personal friend and reported lover of Goya in the years 1796-97 when she had retreated to her Sanlúcar de Barrameda estate in Andalusia after the death of her husband and where Goya had visited her for an extended summer painting trip. (Goya made several signed drawings of her at Sanlúcar that survive and that show a strong physical resemblance to the Maja's face.) The second candidate is Pepita Tudó (1779-1869), Manuel Godoy's young Madrid mistress whom he had taken into the palace in the late 1790s and had publicly acknowledged as his common-law partner by 1800. Godoy's later memoirs (published posthumously in Paris in 1836) explicitly claim that the model was Tudó.
The 1958 carbon-dating analysis of the canvases suggested that the Naked Maja was painted around 1797-1800 and the Clothed Maja around 1800-05. The 1958 dating, combined with the Duchess of Alba's documented presence at Sanlúcar in 1796-97 and her death in 1802, fits the Alba candidacy for the Naked but rules her out for the Clothed (Tudó would still have been a candidate for the Clothed since she was Godoy's resident mistress at the time). A 1999 forensic facial-recognition study commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Culture concluded that the Maja's face matched neither candidate cleanly and that the painting was probably composed from several models. The most likely current art-historical reading is that the Maja's face is a composite portrait — partly Alba, partly Tudó, partly a paid Madrid model — designed by Goya specifically to be indeterminate, so that the painting could function as an image of "a Madrid woman" rather than of a specific identifiable individual.
Why the pair still matters
The Goya pair is, in art-historical terms, the structural prototype of the modern un-mythological nude. Manet's Olympia (1863), Courbet's Origin of the World (1866), Modigliani's reclining nudes (1917-19), and the entire twentieth-century tradition of the contemporary-woman-as-direct-subject all descend from the Maja Desnuda. The picture's removal of mythological cover and its frank acknowledgment that the patron commissioned the picture for its erotic charge is, in the strictest historical sense, the first European painting to behave like a modern image. The sliding mechanism behind which it hung in Godoy's cabinet — the social acknowledgment that the picture could be shown in two registers depending on which visitor was looking — is the prototype of every later debate about whether a contemporary nude is private erotic material or public artistic statement.
The two paintings are now on permanent display together in a Madrid collection — in the same room, in the original near-identical horizontal format, with no sliding mechanism between them. They are the most-visited pair of paintings in the entire Goya corpus and the central example of "the pair" as a deliberate compositional device in European painting. Almost every later painter who composed a deliberate "pair" of identical-format paintings showing the same subject under two visual treatments — Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe / Olympia 1863-65, Cézanne's pairs of Card Players, Picasso's blue-rose pairs, the Bonnard-Vuillard interior pairs — has been working with the Maja precedent. The Goya pair is the canonical example of how a painter can use one picture to interrogate the other, the clothed and the naked existing in a single conceptual unit that means more together than either painting could mean alone.
Key takeaways
Francisco de Goya painted La Maja Desnuda (c. 1797-1800) and La Maja Vestida (c. 1800-05) — two near-identical paintings of the same reclining woman on the same green velvet couch in the same Madrid year. Oil on canvas, about 97 × 190 cm each. The only compositional difference between the two pictures is the clothing.
The Maja Desnuda is the first un-mythological reclining female nude in the European canon since classical antiquity. Every previous canonical reclining nude — Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, Titian's Venus of Urbino, Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, Boucher's Reclining Girl — had defended the nudity by attaching it to a mythological subject. Goya removed the mythological cover.
The two paintings hung in the private cabinet of the Spanish Prime Minister Manuel Godoy in Madrid on a specially built sliding mechanism that let visitors see either the clothed version or the naked one underneath at the pull of a cord. The cabinet contained several other nudes including a presumed lost Velázquez Venus.
Manuel Godoy was the personal favourite of Queen María Luisa, chief minister of Spain from 1792 to 1808, and the most powerful man in the country after the king. His political collapse came in March 1808 when Napoleon's army occupied Madrid; the Godoy palace was sacked, the Maja paintings were confiscated by the French occupation administration, and Godoy fled into a 43-year exile in Rome.
In March 1815 the Spanish Inquisition opened a formal trial against Goya for the obscenity of the Maja Desnuda. The penalty on conviction would have been excommunication, confiscation of all property, and possible imprisonment. Goya refused three times to identify the model. The case was eventually dropped and the two paintings were returned to him in late 1815.
The identity of the model has been the subject of approximately 200 years of speculation. The two leading candidates are the Duchess of Alba (Goya's reported lover in 1796-97) and Pepita Tudó (Godoy's young Madrid mistress). A 1999 forensic facial-recognition study concluded that the face matched neither candidate cleanly and is probably a composite portrait of several models — designed by Goya specifically to be indeterminate.
The pair is the structural prototype of the modern un-mythological nude. Manet's Olympia (1863), Courbet's Origin of the World (1866), Modigliani's reclining nudes (1917-19), and the entire twentieth-century tradition of contemporary-woman-as-direct-subject all descend from the Maja Desnuda.
The two paintings are now on permanent display together in a Madrid collection — in the same room, in the original near-identical horizontal format, no sliding mechanism between them. They are the most-visited pair in the entire Goya corpus and the canonical European example of "the pair" as a deliberate compositional device.
Browse Goya and Spanish painting prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
Comments