The Ghosts of the Quinta del Sordo
What does a painting lose when it is removed from the room in which it was made? This question led me into an extensive investigation of Goya’s Black Paintings and the vanished Quinta del Sordo. I approached the house as part of the work itself: a private space where disturbing images shared walls with windows, furniture, and the ordinary routines of living.
Using historical photographs, architectural studies, and research into the paintings’ original placement, I modeled the upstairs and downstairs rooms in Maya and developed their textures, lighting, and atmosphere in Unreal Engine. Reconstructing these spaces allowed me to explore how scale, proximity, and changing daylight shape an encounter with the paintings—how one image confronts another across a room, or waits beside a doorway.
The project also considers the missing fifteenth painting, sometimes associated with Heads in a Landscape. Its uncertain place in the story brings absence into the reconstruction, leaving room for what the historical record cannot resolve.
The Ghosts of the Quinta del Sordo brings surviving images into conversation with a lost architecture. Through this reconstruction, I invite viewers to imagine the intimacy of living among Goya’s visions, where the familiar space of a home becomes charged with fear, vulnerability, and the unsettling presence of its painted inhabitants.
