Prado Acquire Goya's Earliest Recorded Work

April 16 2021

Image of Prado Acquire Goya's Earliest Recorded Work

Picture: Prado

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Prado in Madrid has announced that it has acquired Francisco Goya's earliest recorded work. Aníbal vencedor que por primera vez mira a Italia desde los Alpes (Victorious Hannibal Who for the First Time Looks at Italy from the Alps) was purchased for €3.3m by the Friends of the Prado Foundation.

According to press reports:

Dated 1771, the painting fills an important gap in the Prado’s chronological history of the 18th-century artist. It joins Italian Notebook, a sketchbook containing numerous notations, drawings, and musings by the artist, including rough sketches of what would become Hannibal. The painting depicts the Carthaginian general flanked by angels and a procession of soldiers. He would lead his armies across the Pyrenees and Alps into Italy, in one of the most legendary military campaigns in history...

For scholars with a focus on the artist, it is an essential entry in his oeuvre. The work represents an important step in establishing himself as a career painter, and showed early on that he could allude to history, religion, and mythology in one canvas—something he would do again and again throughout his career.

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