No One Was Supposed to See These Paintings

[00:00:00]The paintings you are about to see were never meant to be seen.

[00:00:05]They have no titles. They have no signatures.

[00:00:08]They were never commissioned, never sold, and never exhibited during the lifetime of the man who created them.

[00:00:16]In fact, there is not a single known letter, diary, or document in which he even mentions that they exist.

[00:00:24]For years, they existed in only one place.

[00:00:29]The walls of a private country house on the outskirts of Madrid.

[00:00:35]And the man who painted them lived inside that house surrounded by them in almost complete isolation.

[00:00:45]These works are known today as the black paintings.

[00:00:50]They were created by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya between 1819 and 1823, but this story hides not one mystery, but two.

[00:01:02]Because we not only have to ask why the most famous painter in Spain covered the walls of his own home with his darkest visions, we also have to ask something far more uncomfortable.

[00:01:16]Why do some experts today doubt that he painted them at all?

[00:01:23]Let's find out.

[00:01:26]By 1819, Goya was at the very top of the Spanish art world. He had painted kings, queens, and duchesses, and cheerful scenes of dances, picnics, and games.

[00:01:37]But behind that success, his life had been falling apart for decades.

[00:01:43]In 1793, a mysterious illness nearly killed him and left him completely and permanently deaf.

[00:01:51]From that moment on, Goya lived in absolute silence.

[00:01:56]Then came the war. Between 1808 and 1814, he witnessed the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, and he recorded what he saw in a series of prints so brutal that he never dared to publish them.

[00:02:13]So, this was not the first time Goya created images that no one was supposed to see.

[00:02:19]In February of 1819, at over 70 years old, he bought a country house just outside Madrid.

[00:02:26]And here we find one of the strangest coincidences in the history of art.

[00:02:31]The house was already called Quinta del Sordo, the villa of the deaf man, not because of Goya, but because a previous owner had also been deaf.

[00:02:43]At the end of that same year, Goya fell gravely ill, and once again came close to death.

[00:02:50]We know how serious it was because he later painted himself half conscious in bed, held up by his doctor.

[00:02:57]And then, instead of resting, this deaf man in his 70s did something nobody expected.

[00:03:05]He began to paint directly onto the plaster walls of his house, in oil, with no commission, no known preparatory drawings, and no apparent intention of ever showing the results to anyone.

[00:03:20]14 scenes divided between two large rooms, one on the ground floor, one on the upper floor.

[00:03:28]And what he painted there is unlike anything else in the history of art.

[00:03:34]In the room believed to have been his dining room, Goya painted a giant with wild, terrified eyes devouring the bloody body of a man.

[00:03:44]It is the god Saturn eating his own children out of fear that one of them would overthrow him.

[00:03:53]Which means that for years this man ate his meals in front of that image.

[00:04:01]A few steps away, an enormous black he-goat, the devil himself, presides over a crowd of deformed, terrified faces.

[00:04:10]On another wall, a woman dressed in mourning leans against a dark mound that many believe is a tomb.

[00:04:18]She is thought to be Leocadia Weiss, the widow who lived with Goya and cared for him during those years.

[00:04:26]There is Judith beheading a man in almost total darkness.

[00:04:31]Two men beating each other with cudgels while their legs sink into the ground.

[00:04:37]And then, there is the painting that no one has ever been able to explain.

[00:04:43]A vast, empty, golden space, and at the bottom, barely visible, the small, dark head of a dog looking upward.

[00:04:55]That is all.

[00:04:57]We do not know if the dog is sinking, hiding, or struggling to climb.

[00:05:03]We do not know what it is looking at.

[00:05:06]And we do not know what Goya wanted to say with it.

[00:05:10]The work is known today simply as The Dog.

[00:05:15]The Spanish painter Antonio Saura went as far as describing it as the most beautiful picture in the world.

[00:05:23]But the mysteries of this house do not end with what is visible on the walls.

[00:05:28]Because when researchers examined these works with x-rays, they discovered something hidden underneath.

[00:05:36]Beneath several of the black scenes, there are earlier compositions, brighter ones, landscapes with hills, trees, and small figures.

[00:05:46]Researchers believe Goya himself painted them when he first moved in, which means the darkness was not the original plan.

[00:05:56]At some point, something changed inside him, and he deliberately buried his own brighter world under these black visions.

[00:06:07]Then, in 1824, he abandoned them.

[00:06:11]Spain had entered a period of brutal political repression, and Goya, who had liberal sympathies, had reasons to fear for his safety.

[00:06:20]He settled in Bordeaux and died there in 1828 without ever returning, and without ever explaining what he had left on those walls.

[00:06:30]For decades, the murals remained in the house, slowly deteriorating, until 1873, when the property was purchased by the French banker Baron Émile d'Erlanger, and he decided to attempt the impossible.

[00:06:46]He hired Salvador Martínez Cubells, chief restorer of the Prado Museum, to physically detach the paintings from the walls and transfer them onto canvas.

[00:06:58]The paintings survived the process, but they paid a terrible price.

[00:07:04]Entire sections of paint were lost, and the damaged areas were repainted by the restorer's own hand.

[00:07:11]In The Fight with Cudgels, for example, some researchers believe the two men were originally standing in a field of tall grass, and that the ground swallowing their legs today is partly the result of the restoration.

[00:07:25]So, when we look at the Black Paintings today, we are looking, at least in part, at an interpretation.

[00:07:32]In 1878, d'Erlanger exhibited the paintings at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, hoping to find a buyer.

[00:07:41]Almost no one was interested.

[00:07:44]He donated the entire series to the Spanish state in 1881, and they entered the Prado.

[00:07:51]The house itself was demolished in the early 20th century.

[00:07:54]The walls Goya painted no longer exist.

[00:07:58]And it is precisely here that this story takes its strangest turn.

[00:08:04]In 2003, Juan Lagos Junquera, a professor of art history, published a study that shook the art world.

[00:08:12]After examining the property records of the Quinta del Sordo, he claimed that during Goya's lifetime, the documents describe the house as having only one floor.

[00:08:24]According to him, the upper floor, where seven of the paintings were located, including the dog, did not exist until after Goya's death.

[00:08:34]And if that were true, it would mean something almost unthinkable.

[00:08:39]That a large part of the Black Paintings could not have been painted by Goya.

[00:08:45]Junquera even pointed to a possible author.

[00:08:49]Goya's own son, Javier.

[00:08:52]However, the majority of art historians firmly reject this theory.

[00:08:57]They point to an inventory of the house drawn up around the time of Goya's death, which already describes paintings on both floors.

[00:09:06]They point to visitors who wrote about the murals decades before they were removed.

[00:09:10]And the Prado has never changed the attribution.

[00:09:14]But the seed of doubt has never completely disappeared.

[00:09:18]Because the truth is, almost everything about these paintings escapes certainty.

[00:09:24]We do not know what Goya called them.

[00:09:27]We do not even know if he considered them finished.

[00:09:31]And we will never be able to study them exactly as he made them, because the originals were painted on walls that no longer exist.

[00:09:40]14 images created in silence by a deaf options who told no one, explained nothing, and walked away.