Maribel Verdú (2006)" border="0" />updated: 05/10/2007
Maribel Verdú (2006)" border="0" />
Laura Morante (2002)" border="0" />
María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva y Álvarez de Toledo (1762—1802), 13th duchess of Alba, was renowned for her beauty, charm and wilfulness – and her rumoured relationship with Franciso de Goya. There were also rumours that she was poisoned by the queen, by whom she was hated – only disproved when her body was exhumed and autopsied in 1945.
Whatever, the truth of her relationship with Goya – and the model for the Majas (‘the first purely profane, life-sized female nude in Western art’) was more probably Pepita Tudo, Countess of Castillo Fiel – the duchess of Alba was clearly exceptional amongst aristocratic Spanish women of the time and has been described as ‘the first lady of the realm’ after the queen:
She was without question one of the most beautiful women in Spain – a fact noted by nearly every man who met and wrote about her. She was tall, slender, with flashing dark eyes and a fine-boned face – perhaps a little too long for modern tastes – surmounted by a mop of thick, dark curls. . . If the word existed in the eighteenth century, she would have been formidably hip – what else could an aristocratic maja wish to be? (Robert Hughes Goya)
Curiously, for a website on makeup, one of Goya's earliest references to the duchess, recorded in a surviving letter, describes how she persuaded him to do her makeup: ‘the Alba woman, who yesterday came to the studio to make me paint her face, and she got her way; I certainly enjoy it more than painting on canvas, and I still have to do a full-length portrait of her’.
Volavérunt: featuring Aitana Sánchez-Gijón as the duchess – coming soon.
Goya en Burdeos: perhaps this movie should have been called Goya’s Ghosts; eighty-two-year-old Franciso de Goya, living in exile in Bordeaux, reconstucts the main events of his life for his daughter Rosario, remembering his only true love, the duchess of Alba (Maribel Verdú), a woman who changed both Goya and the history of her times, and whose life was cut short by the poison of conspiracy. José Quetglás was key makeup artist; Blanca Sánchez was key hair stylist; Susana Sánchez was makeup artist.
Goya: a biopic mini-series featuring Laura Morante as the duchess of Alba. José Antonio Sánchez was responsible for characterisation and wigs. Unfortunately, I don’t have a decent contemporary headshoot of Laura Morante: the ‘before’ image here dates from 2002 – some seventeen years later.