Romanticism

La maja desnuda

It is considered one of the first images in Western art of a nude woman with visible body hair and no mythological excuse — no Venus, just a real woman meeting your eye.

Francisco Goya · 1800

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Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)

Author

Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Naked Maja led the Inquisition to summon Goya and demand that he name the patron and justify the painting's indecency.

Highlights

Facts & legends

It is considered one of the first images in Western art of a nude woman with visible body hair and no mythological excuse — no Venus, just a real woman meeting your eye.
The Naked Maja led the Inquisition to summon Goya and demand that he name the patron and justify the painting's indecency.
It was commissioned by the all-powerful prime minister Manuel Godoy, who hid it with his other nudes in a room with double walls.
The model's identity is still unproven: some see the Duchess of Alba, others Godoy's mistress Pepita Tudó.
There is a clothed twin, The Clothed Maja; by legend it slid over the nude on a special mechanism to hide her from prying eyes.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

More details How a private Venus without mythological disguise faced the Inquisition, why her identity remains unknown, and what connects the naked and clothed versions.

A contemporary rather than a goddess

Goya kept the pose of Venus and removed the mythological cover

Painted around 1795–1800, The Naked Maja belongs to the long tradition of reclining Venuses from Titian to Velázquez. Yet no Cupid, jewel or emblem transports the body into antiquity. The woman looks directly at the viewer and appears not as a remote deity but as someone from Goya's own world.

Maja described a stylish Madrid woman associated with popular urban culture. The title came later. Early records called the work a Venus, and an 1808 inventory described both versions as “Gypsies”. Each name changes the encounter: myth makes nudity conventional, while “maja” brings the body into contemporary Madrid.

Manuel Godoy's private cabinet

The first documented owner collected forbidden Venuses

In November 1800 engraver Pedro González de Sepúlveda saw the painting in the palace of Manuel Godoy, chief minister to Charles IV. It hung in an inner cabinet with Velázquez's Rokeby Venus and other female nudes. This was not a public gallery but a restricted room in the home of an exceptionally powerful collector.

Godoy probably commissioned the picture directly, although no contract survives. It allowed him to place a living Spanish painter beside old masters while possessing an image never intended for general access. Secrecy was not an accident around the work; it shaped its original audience.

Two nearly identical bodies

The clothed version is not simply a cover painted over nudity

Goya later made The Clothed Maja. Dimensions and pose nearly match, but clothing does not make the image timid. White blouse, sash and short jacket intensify colour and the woman's stare. A popular story claims a mechanism displayed one canvas in front of the other. It is an ingenious possibility, not a documented fact.

The pair works better as two independent answers to one pose. In the nude, flesh is softly modelled against darkness; in the companion, fabric and silhouette become more emphatic. Together they ask what disturbed viewers most: exposed skin, direct eye contact, or a woman who refuses the modest role assigned to a classical Venus.

The Inquisition demanded a name

Goya was summoned to identify model and patron

After Godoy's fall, his collection was seized. In 1814 the Inquisition claimed both Majas as obscene, and in 1815 it summoned Goya to explain who the woman was, who had commissioned the paintings and why. His answer is unknown. The canvases remained hidden within institutions for decades rather than becoming public trophies.

They moved to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1836; the nude was still withheld from ordinary display. Both entered the Prado in 1901. A private image made for controlled viewing, then treated as evidence, became a national masterpiece. The danger was not a later publicity story but part of its real history.

A face without a proven name

The famous candidates remain legends

The model has often been identified as the Duchess of Alba, linked to Goya by rumour, or Pepita Tudó, Godoy's lover and later wife. Documentation proves neither, and comparison with secure portraits of the duchess has long raised doubts. A professional model whose name went unrecorded remains entirely possible.

Another attractive tale claimed that Goya repainted the head to conceal the sitter. Prado X-radiography found no significant alteration there: head and body were conceived together. Science did not identify the woman, but it removed a theatrical explanation. The mystery survives because the archive is incomplete.

Official sources