A couple of years ago, I was invited to give a lecture on aspects of Goya's work at the Studio School in New York. Since that time, I've noticed a growing popular fascination with the artist. Last year, Julia Blackburn published Old Man Goya, a very personal account of the painter's life. Robert Hughes and Evan S. Connell have recently completed books on Goya: Hughes's was published this month. Last summer, I ran into the producer Saul Zaentz, who told me he was working on a movie project about Goya, and controversy has recently surrounded the Black Paintings with the claims by Spanish art historian Juan José Junquera that Goya did not paint those astounding late works. For a man who has been dead for 175 years, Goya is remarkably present among us still.  In June, I spent three weeks in Barcelona as a guest of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes. I was working on an essay about Los Caprichos, Goya's collection of 80 prints first published in 1799, but was also drawn to the painting The Third of May (El Tres de Mayo), the artist's famous depiction of Napoleon's soldiers executing rebellious Spanish peasants in 1808. El Tres de Mayo is so well known that even people who have forgotten the title remember its central character - the agonised young man in a white shirt and yellow trousers who kneels before raised rifles with his hands in the air.  Last month, I made a pilgrimage to the Prado in Madrid to see the original and discovered more than I had expected - a hidden image that nobody has ever discussed or written about. It is a large work, 268cm by 347cm, and familiar as the image was, I first had to adjust to its scale. Fortunately, there was a chair near the wall, and I sat down to get a broad view at my leisure. Every once in a while, I would stand up and walk toward various parts of the canvas for a closer look. When I study a painting, I let myself float in the image. I jot down thoughts as they come to me and make primitive drawings to feel the paintings's configurations in my own hand. It always takes time.  After about an hour, I began to examine the shadowy space in the lower left-hand corner, an ambiguous area that puzzled me. In the foreground, bloody corpses lie on top of one another, but above those bodies are two strange people. The uppermost figure is cloaked and appears to be an older woman. Beneath her is another person, darker and more vague, a being whose contours vanish into darkness.  Who are they? What are they doing there? They are more like ghosts than living people, smoky mourners who seem to rise out of the earth. I kept staring at them, trying to make out the outlines of their bodies in relation to the hill and to the dead men lying below, and while I looked, I began to see new shapes and shadows beneath the lower spectre - what could have been an arm, another head, mouths, and faces.  I told myself that I had looked too long at this section of the painting and was seeing things the way children see images in shadows or clouds. And then, to my utter astonishment, I saw Goya's face staring out at me. It's a simple rendering - large eyes, flat nose and open mouth, but it includes the artist's signature leonine hair flowing out from around his jawline. I turned away, thinking I had really gone crazy. After a moment, I looked back. He was still there.  I left the room, went to look at the Black Paintings for a while, returned, parked myself in front of the spot - and saw him again. I was already late to meet my husband, daughter and a friend in the museum café. I flew downstairs and dragged my three witnesses up to the painting, planted them in front of the nearly invisible self-portrait and asked them to look. They all saw it. There is a fleck of white paint in Goya's left eye that allows the spectator to orient himself and identify the face.  Upon my return to New York, I told a friend, Nicole Krauss, a young novelist and art writer, about the hidden face. The next day, she went off on a tour for art aficionados in France and met the English Goya scholar, Juliet Wilson-Bareau. Nicole mentioned my revelation to her, and Wilson-Bareau confirmed that no one had ever written about it.  It is entirely possible that other visitors to the Prado have seen Goya's image in El Tres de Mayo and simply accepted it as part of the painting, but the fact that over the course of 189 years no art historian has ever men tioned the phantom face is peculiar. Goya chose to haunt his own canvas, and that choice changes the painting's meaning. He painted it six years after the executions took place and buried himself within his depiction of the bloody event as a wraith-like grieving presence. He implicates himself in the story, becoming another ghost of the many who died that day - the ghost of memory that insists that the senseless murders never be forgotten.  Siri Hustvedt is a novelist. Her most recent book, What I Loved , is published by Sceptre
Goya's masterpiece has always stunned its admirers, but Siri Hustvedt claims it holds an even more amazing secret.