INV. 060 · Artwork
Scene of an Inquisition tribunal, Francisco de Goya
This is a modern artwork. It shows how a later age imagined the past, not how the past was.
A later representation of defendants before a tribunal. It illustrates the memory of the Inquisition, not a specific fifteenth-century trial.
- Type
- Artwork
- Nature
- Modern artworkA later artistic interpretation; not a document of the period.
- Date of the object
- 1815A later painting, made by Goya around 1812 to 1819.
- Image
- Francisco de Goya
- Licence
- Public domain
- Retrieved
- Commons API, 2026-10-15
Sourced historical context
In 1478 the Catholic Monarchs asked the pope to authorize a national Inquisition, which began operating in 1481.
Those convicted of Judaizing could lose property and be handed to secular power for execution.
In summer 1391 riots that began in Seville killed or drove to baptism tens of thousands of Jews across Iberia. The Tortosa disputation (1413 to 1414) further increased conversions and consolidated the social class of conversos, whose ambiguous identity (and the charge of 'Judaizing') would shape Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.