Maja Diagnosed

For a century and a half, the story was one of the tidbits in Europe's chronique scandaleuse. Spain's great painter Francisco Jose Goya y Lucientes, also known as "the Turbulent," took a more than artistic interest in the beautiful Maria Teresa, Duchess of Alba (so gossip whispered in history's ear), and amused himself by painting her in the nude. A well-wisher tipped off her husband, the 13th Duke of Alba, who flew into a boiling Spanish rage. Gallant Goya had to think fast.

At high speed he proceeded to do a second painting of the Duchess in exactly the same pose (reclining on a couch, her arms folded under her head, a subtly inviting smile on her lips), but this time dressed in white silk. Confronted with the second picture, the Duke was temporarily appeased; but something apparently went wrong, he found out the truth and promptly poisoned his unfaithful wife. Goya lived to be 82, and the two pictures became world-famous as La Maja Vestida (Gay Lady Clothed) and La Maja Desnuda (Gay Lady Nude).

Last week, before a tense meeting of Madrid's Academy of History, Dr. Carlos Blanco Soler denounced the whole scandal as a frivolous fraud. Since December, he said, he and two fellow scholars had been examining the Duchess' mummified body. Their verdict was death from natural causes--meningeal encephalitis, aggravated by tuberculosis, as evidenced by a tubercular lesion in the right lung and a spinal curvature. The experts reported no traces of poison.

Dr. Soler added that, according to his research, Goya probably had never been the Duchess' lover. Reason: her Grace was cold, narcissistic--not stormy Goya's type. The tale had just been dreamed up by writers, probably French.

Present and pleased to hear his great-great-grandfather exonerated of uxoricide and his great-great-grandmother of adultery with a commoner was the 17th Duke of Alba, who himself presided over the meeting.

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