Who is this voluptuous woman, dressed in translucent clothes, more suitable for a harem – in one picture, and a woman shamelessly exposing her beauty to the view of the whole world – to another? Is this the same woman? Passionate, provocative, seductive, shameless, since her gaze is fixed without a shadow of embarrassment directly at the viewer. However, what is her name? Most answer: in two paintings – the Duchess of Alba, as no legend in art has taken such deep roots in the imagination of the public as a romantic assumption that, during his passionate affair with the duchess, Goya immortalized her on these two canvases. More convincing is the hypothesis that the model for paintings could serve as the mistress of Manuel Godoy, the prime minister and lover of Queen Maria-Louise.
Both of these paintings were listed in the property inventory Godoy, when he left Spain in 1808. But this is only circumstantial evidence, and it did not shake the general confidence that the artist’s model was the Duchess of Alba. In the end, relatively recently, in 1945, the Alba family, wanting to convince everyone that the duchess is not related to these paintings, agreed to exhume her body to compare the size of the skeleton with those presented in the picture. The results of the measurements did not give anything, but a strange fact was revealed: both legs of the duchess were broken; perhaps it happened when her coffin was thrown out of the family tomb during the war with the French. But whoever posed for these paintings, maha became one of the most delightful women in the world.
Nude maja Goya – one of the most seductive and attractive women ever created by the artist’s imagination. It is surprising and the fact that Goya ventured to write this picture, since nude figures are extremely rare in Spanish art. One of the rarest and most beautiful “nude” in the whole of Western painting – “Venus” Velazquez. But “Maha” Goya is not a goddess, nor is it a quiet, realistic study of the anatomy of the human body; without a doubt – it’s a living woman, quite real, but seductively romanticized.
Not all Spanish society appreciated the “Naked Mach”; when the plot became known, the artist was summoned to the Inquisition. Was the trial of Goya, it is unknown, but his paintings were not burned, and he himself was not put in jail. Perhaps, one of his high-ranking patrons stood up for him. And Goya, who did not deny himself the pleasure of shocking the society on occasion, but always avoided his fatal embrace, never discovered who had posed for him for this picture. But, until the death of the Duchess Alba, these two works were in her boudoir, and after her death went to Manuel Godoy. Since 1814, they began to be stored in the Academy of San Fernando, where they were soon transferred to the Prado.
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