A Pilgrimage to San Isidro

A Pilgrimage to San Isidro, painted around 1820–23 on the walls of Goya's Quinta del Sordo, is a devastating transformation of the celebratory pilgrimage subject he had painted in sunlit, festive mode in 1788 for the tapestry cartoons. The earlier painting showed the merienda on the banks of the Manzanares as a scene of popular joy; this Black Painting version turns the same pilgrimage into a nocturnal procession of distorted, howling, grotesque figures making their way through darkness. The inversion of his own earlier treatment makes explicit the trajectory of his career from decorative optimism to psychological darkness, and the comparison between the two San Isidro paintings is one of the most concentrated demonstrations of an artist's personal transformation across three decades. The Black Paintings were never exhibited during Goya's lifetime — painted on the walls of a private country house, they were intended for no audience but himself — and the raw, unmediated quality of this dark pilgrimage reflects that freedom from public presentation. The Prado's preservation of all the Black Paintings together maintains the set as a coherent whole.

Goya renders the nocturnal procession with savage expressionism, the faces of the pilgrims distorted into masks of anguish and ecstasy. The dark palette and the sweeping, aggressive brushwork create a panoramic vision of collective derangement.