nt from picture to picture,
commenting on the fashions of the past, feeling a sort of longing for
the curious old crinolines and the broad mantillas with the high combs.
Suddenly they became serious, drew their lips together and started at a
quick pace for the end of the gallery. Instinct warned them. Their
restless eyes felt hurt by the nude in the distance; they seemed to
scent the famous _Maja_ before they saw her and they kept on--erect,
with severe countenances, just as if they were annoyed by some rude
fellow's advances in the street--passing in front of the picture without
turning their faces, without seeing even the adjacent pictures nor
stopping till they reached the Hall of Murillo.

It was the hatred for the nude, the Christian, century-old abomination
of Nature and truth, that rose instinctively to protest against the
toleration of such horrors in a public building which was peopled with
saints, kings and ascetics.

Renovales worshiped the canvas with ardent devotion, and placed it in a
class by itself. It was the first manifestation in Spanish history of
art that was free from scruples, unhampered by prejudice. Three
centuries of painting, several generations of glorious names, succeeded
one another with wonderful fertility; but not until Goya had the Spanish
brush dared to trace the form of a woman's body, the divine nakedness
that among all peoples has been the first inspiration of nascent art.
Renovales remembered another nude, the Venus of Velasquez, preserved
abroad. But that work had not been spontaneous; it was a commission of
the monarch who, at the same time that he was paying foreigners lavishly
for their studies in the nude, wished to have a similar canvas by his
court-painter.

Religious oppression had obscured art for centuries. Human beauty
terrified the great artists, who painted with a cross on their breasts
and a rosary on their sword-hilts. Bodies were hidden under the stiff,
heavy folds of sackcloth or the grotesque, courtly crinoline, and the
painter never ventured to guess what was beneath them, looking at the
model, as the devout worshiper contemplates the hollow mantle of the
Virgin, not knowing whether it contains a body or three sticks to hold
up the head. The joy of life was a sin. In vain a sun fairer than that
of Venice shone on Spanish soil, futile was the light that burned upon
the land with a brighter glow than that of Flanders: Spanish art was
dark, lifeless, sober, even a