Friar Pedro Binds El Maragato with a Rope

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes · c. 1806

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

29.2 × 38.5 cm (11 1/2 × 15 5/8 in.); Framed: 41.6 × 51.2 × 6.4 cm (16 3/8 × 20 1/8 × 2 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

One of six small panels depicting a real-life act of unlikely heroism, this scene crackles with raw energy as the Franciscan friar Pedro de Zaldivia wrestles a notorious bandit to submission — painted by Goya with a directness that feels almost cinematic. Goya created these panels around 1806, at a moment when he was pushing toward a looser, more instinctive brushwork that would come to define his late style. The small format seems to have freed him: the marks are quick and decisive, figures reduced to essentials without losing psychological weight. There is no idealism here, no heroic posturing — just the physical fact of one man overpowering another, rendered in warm earth tones and tight, compressed space. The six panels follow the entire episode in sequence, from confrontation to capture, making the series one of the earliest examples of narrative painting treated with something close to a storyboard logic. This hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on panel using traditional oil techniques, with close attention to Goya's characteristic brushwork and the muted, urgent palette that gives the original its sense of immediate action.