In 1819, at age 72, Francisco Goya moved into a two-story villa outside Madrid known as the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man’s Villa, named after a previous owner who, by coincidence, was also deaf. There, in secrecy, he covered the plaster walls of his dining room and sitting room with oil paintings of horrifying imagery that he never titled and never intended anyone to see. This episode explores the pressures that drove him into isolation and what the resulting Black Paintings reveal about a mind pushed to its limits.

We look at his relationship with Leocadia Weiss, the trauma of the Napoleonic Wars and Spain’s violent political swings, his near-fatal illness recorded in Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta, and the cheerful wallpaper he painted over with works like Saturn Devouring His Son, The Witches’ Sabbath, The Dog, and Fight with Cudgels. We then follow how the murals were peeled off the walls in the 1870s, rejected by Paris, donated to the Prado, and challenged by a 2003 authenticity theory that the art world ultimately rejected.

• Why a deeply embittered view of humanity, not just scandal, drove Goya into hiding
• How Charles Yriarte’s observation about tall grass changes the meaning of Fight with Cudgels
• The missing fifteenth painting, believed to be Heads in a Landscape, now in a private New York collection
• The delicate cloth-and-glue extraction process that transferred the murals from plaster to canvas
• Juan José Junquera’s one-floor fraud theory and Nigel Glendinning’s point-by-point rebuttal