In 1919, Spanish officials opened Francisco Goya's tomb in France to bring him home to Madrid and discovered his skull was missing. The reply from Madrid: send Goya with or without head. This episode uses that surreal moment as the entry point to the life of the man considered the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns, from a gilder's son in Fuendetodos who was rejected twice by the Royal Academy to the first court painter to King Charles IV.

We follow his cheerful Rococo tapestry cartoons, his unflinching royal portraits, the scandal of La Maja Desnuda and the Inquisition, and the mysterious 1792-93 illness that left him permanently deaf. From there we trace the Caprichos and The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the secret Disasters of War etchings, his bitter disillusionment with Ferdinand VII, and the final withdrawal to ...