In 1919, Spanish officials opened Francisco Goya’s tomb in France to bring him home to Madrid and discovered his skull was missing. The reply from Madrid: send Goya with or without head. This episode uses that surreal moment as the entry point to the life of the man considered the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns, from a gilder’s son in Fuendetodos who was rejected twice by the Royal Academy to the first court painter to King Charles IV.

We follow his cheerful Rococo tapestry cartoons, his unflinching royal portraits, the scandal of La Maja Desnuda and the Inquisition, and the mysterious 1792-93 illness that left him permanently deaf. From there we trace the Caprichos and The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the secret Disasters of War etchings, his bitter disillusionment with Ferdinand VII, and the final withdrawal to the Quinta del Sordo, where he painted the Black Paintings directly onto his walls.

• How designing tapestries trained Goya as a clinical observer of Spanish society
• Why Spain’s tradition of gritty religious realism let him paint the royal family without flattery
• Competing theories about his deafness, including viral encephalitis, Ménière’s disease and lead poisoning
• Why The Disasters of War stayed hidden until 1863, 35 years after his death
• Saturn Devouring His Son, the move to Bordeaux, and his late mastery of lithography