Stunning Frescoes in This Madrid Church Received a Facelift—But the Spanish Artist Buried Beneath Them Is Still Missing His Head

Goya’s frescoes are given new life in a church in Spain that also serves as the final resting place for most of the artist’s body. The mystery of his missing skull has inspired poems and artworks

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

May 18, 2026 4:10 p.m.

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A year-long renovation in Madrid’s San Antonio de la Florida church is nearly complete. When its doors reopen, visitors will enjoy improved lighting, fresh-painted walls and a renewed view of the historic art adorning the chapel’s ceiling and dome: colorful frescoes that one of Spain’s most enduring artists, Francisco de Goya, painted at the end of the 18th century.

For months, restorers worked in the modest church—which was built in the late 18th century by Filippo Fontana, an Italian architect, for Charles IV—to bring the faded artwork back to its original form.

“The vision of the frescoes has improved enormously,” Andrea San Valentin, the architect who oversaw the restoration, tells the Times of London’s Isambard Wilkinson. “People are going to see the real colors at last.”

The pigments were centuries old. Goya was commissioned to paint the frescoes in 1798 and traveled daily to the then-brand-new church by a carriage arranged by the king. The scene Goya brought to life over the course of six months was striking. Spanning a cupola 20 feet in diameter, Saint Anthony of Padua resurrects a dead man in order to exonerate the man’s father, who was falsely accused of his murder. Notably, the miracle’s many witnesses, gathered under clouds, trees and a blue sky, are ordinary Spanish townsfolk—a departure from the robed, religious figures one might expect from frescoes of the time.

“It was revolutionary,” Ángel Balao, a historian and restoration specialist, tells the Times. “They are not dressed as they should have been at the time of Saint Anthony. They are dressed in a Goyaesque way.”

The artwork was widely celebrated, and Goya’s connection to San Antonio de la Florida grew stronger after his death in 1828. His body, originally buried in Bordeaux, France, was repatriated to Spain and then eventually reburied at the church in 1919.

There was just one problem. When Goya’s French grave was exhumed, his skull was discovered missing.

When diplomats in Bordeaux asked colleagues in Spain for guidance on how to proceed, they famously received a telegram that said: “Send Goya, with or without head.”

Theories about the artist’s missing head abound, reported Far Out magazine’s Poppy Burton in 2023. It may have been stolen by grave robbers eager to study its dimensions, since phrenology—the idea that a skull’s distinct shape indicated mental ability, now known to be a pseudoscience—was popular at the time. “Goya, the pioneering genius that he was, was a prime target for some skull-searching,” Burton wrote.

An 1849 painting by Dionisio Fierros—completed more than a half-century before Goya was discovered to be missing his skull—offers different clues. An inscription on the canvas, which depicts a skull, suggests that Fierros used Goya’s skull as a reference. A third theory is that Goya requested his skull be removed after his death and buried next to the Duchess of Alba, with whom he had fallen in love.

The allure of Goya’s artwork and the mystery of his incomplete skeleton continue to inspire artists.

“Painter, you are a lucky man to lie / though shorter by a head, here in this dome / made sacred by the years, by art sublime / where human angels crowd the ceiling stones / to hear the truth arise and testify…” wrote the poet Paul Petrie in his poem “The Church of San Antonio De La Florida (Goya Pantheon),” published in the New Yorker in 1959.

“Goya is best remembered for his exploration of the dark subconscious—and well before Freud gave us the terminology to discuss it,” Francis Ribemont, a Goya scholar and former curator of Bordeaux’s Musée des Beaux Arts, told the New York Times in 2007. “He was revolutionary. No painter had ever gone there before.”

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.