The Inquisition Tribunal

Goya's Inquisition Tribunal, painted around 1812–19 and held at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, depicts a scene of Inquisitorial judgment with the same unflinching eye he brought to all institutional cruelty. The accused in their conical sanbenito hats of the condemned stand before judges and an assembled audience; Goya documents the spectacle without melodrama, allowing the architecture of injustice to speak for itself. His opposition to the Inquisition was lifelong and deeply felt: the Caprichos prints of 1799 satirised religious superstition, and his own appearance before the Inquisition in 1815 to explain La Maja Desnuda gave him personal experience of its procedures. The painting was made in a period of intense political instability — the Spanish Constitution of 1812 had temporarily abolished the Inquisition before Ferdinand VII restored it in 1814 — and its subject carried immediate political significance. The Royal Academy's possession of this work preserves it in the institution Goya served as director of painting and where he deposited some of his most personal and politically charged works.

Goya renders the vaulted chamber with dramatic chiaroscuro, the accused figures illuminated against the dark space. The broad, expressionistic brushwork and the distorted faces in the crowd demonstrate the savage satirical vision of his mature work.