Adoration of the Name of God

Goya's Adoration of the Name of God from 1772, painted on the ceiling of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza, is his earliest major surviving work and the commission that launched his career in his home city. The fresco, depicting a heavenly vision of angels and the Holy Name surrounded by divine light, was executed in the illusionistic tradition of Italian Baroque ceiling painting that the young Goya had absorbed during his Italian studies. The Basilica of the Pillar was one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Spain — the shrine associated with the apparition of the Virgin to Saint James — and the commission of its ceiling decoration to a twenty-six-year-old Aragonese painter was a mark of significant early confidence in Goya's abilities. His later work on the same basilica, in the late 1770s and 1780s, would demonstrate the extraordinary development of his fresco technique; comparison of the 1772 ceiling with the Queen of Martyrs fresco of 1780–81 documents one of the most rapid artistic evolutions in the history of Spanish religious decoration.

The fresco technique demonstrates Goya's early ability to work at monumental scale with the dramatic foreshortening and atmospheric effects required of ceiling painting. The luminous palette and the upward-spiraling composition show the influence of Tiepolo and the Italian decorative tradition.