The Holy Office (Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro)

What you're looking at

A huge dark hill, shaggy with scrub, fills the right half of the picture. At its foot, packed into the right foreground, stands a cluster of figures who face us: old women in white headscarves and shawls, with deep-set, staring eyes, and among them men in dark clothes, one or two of whom seem to wear hoods. Behind them, a long column of small figures stretches away to the left along a path or road, toward a stretch of open ground and a pale, cloudy sky.

The colors are earth and smoke: brown, ocher, gray and black, with the whites of the women's headscarves and a few faces catching the light. The canvas, about 127 by 266 cm, is wider than it is tall, a long landscape format like several of the murals from the same upper room.

The foreground figures are close enough to read as individuals, but Goya gives them very little individuality. Their eyes are dark smudges, their mouths small and set. They look less like pilgrims on a holiday than like witnesses at something grim.

What is The Holy Office (Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro)?

The painting has two titles, and both are later inventions; Goya named none of the Black Paintings. The Prado catalogues it as Peregrinación a la fuente de San Isidro, or Pilgrimage to the Fountain of San Isidro. The alternative title, El Santo Oficio, The Holy Office, is the old official name of the Spanish Inquisition, and it reflects a reading of the foreground group as officials or followers of the Inquisition in procession.

The first title links it to the spring at the hermitage of San Isidro, on the west bank of the Manzanares near Goya's house, whose waters were believed to heal. The second makes it political. Neither can be proved. What the picture shows is a procession and a group of grim, staring people in a desolate place, and the two titles show how early viewers tried to name what they felt in front of it.

Why the Inquisition reading matters

Goya had been mocking the Inquisition for decades. In the Caprichos prints of 1799 he showed victims in the tall paper hats of the condemned, and in drawings from the 1810s he recorded people punished by the Inquisition for being born elsewhere or for being of Jewish descent. In 1814 Ferdinand VII restored the Inquisition after the Peninsular War; the liberal government abolished it again in 1820, during the very years Goya was covering the walls of his house. A painting of a dark, solemn procession in the upper room of a liberal's private home invites the reading the second title gives it, even if Goya never wrote a word about it.

Not to be confused with A Pilgrimage to San Isidro

The house held two pictures connected with San Isidro, and they are often mixed up. A Pilgrimage to San Isidro (La romería de San Isidro) is the huge ground-floor frieze of singing, gaping pilgrims at night, which faced the Witches' Sabbath. The Holy Office is a smaller, quieter picture from the upper room, with the crowd pushed into the distance and a few hard-faced figures brought close.

Where it hung

This painting was in the upper room of the Quinta del Sordo, on the right-hand wall beyond the window, near Fantastic Vision (Asmodea). Facing it across the room were Atropos (The Fates) and Fight with Cudgels. All four share the long landscape format and the motif of figures set against a wide, empty countryside, which suggests Goya planned the room's long walls as a group.

The best-known image from the house, Saturn Devouring His Son, hung downstairs.

How it survived

The Black Paintings were painted in oil directly on plaster between about 1819 and 1823. In 1873–74 the banker Baron Émile d'Erlanger, then the owner of the house, had them transferred to canvas by the Prado restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells. Paint was lost and retouched in the process. D'Erlanger showed the canvases in Paris in 1878 and gave them to the Spanish state, which accepted them in 1881. Photographs taken by Jean Laurent around 1874, before the transfer, record the murals as they looked on the walls and are an important source for judging how much the restorers changed.

What to notice

Look at the hill. It takes up half the canvas and is painted more freely than anything else, scraped and dabbed in browns that seem to move. The figures are pressed into the space between it and the frame, as if the land itself were crowding them. Then find the white headscarves: they form a chain of pale shapes across the foreground that leads the eye from face to face.

Where to see The Holy Office today

The painting is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where the Black Paintings hang together in one room on the ground floor.