The Expressive Body in Goya's Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent

This essay examines Francisco Goya's Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, 1788, in relation to late eighteenth-century aesthetic thought in Spain. Although modern scholarship has focused on the emergence of the supernatural in this work, a neglected contemporary analysis by Pedro de Silva, an adviser to the Madrid and Valencia royal academies, provides a point of departure for the examination of Goya's depiction of the dying sinner. Within this context, it is argued that the painting marks a significant crossroad in Goya's representation of the human figure.