The Architect Ventura Rodríguez

Ventura Rodríguez was the most considerable Spanish architect of the eighteenth century — the designer of the basilica of San Francisco el Grande in Madrid and of the fountain of Cibeles, and the man who drove the building of the Holy Chapel at the basilica of the Pilar in Zaragoza. Goya came from the same region, born at Fuendetodos in Aragon, and had been working at the Spanish court since the mid-1770s when he painted him in 1784, a year before the architect’s death, with the appointment as painter to King Charles III only two years away. Portraiture is where his art was going: the sitters of those years, painted while he was still supplying tapestry cartoons to the royal manufactory, lead directly to the great portraits of the 1790s and to everything that followed them. The canvas measures 107 × 81 cm and is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.