The great Spanish artist Francisco de Goya was left deaf by an illness at the age of 46. As if it were a cruel echo, a copy of the fifth edition of his copper etchings was left silent on a library shelf for decades. The volume was rediscovered in the library of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Guatemala City in June 2005 and will open in an exhibition behind glass on Friday, December 9 at 8:00 p.m. in the Museo Moderno Arte Marco Agusto Quiroa of Hotel Casa Santo Domingo, La Antigua Guatemala.

Self-portrait; from a print in La Tauromaquia

Los Grabados de La Tauromaquia collection was brought from Madrid in 1922 by then Guatemalan ambassador Enrique Fraumann, who turned the diplomatic gift over to the National Academy of Fine Arts. How the 38 bound prints became classified as a book, shelved for anyone to leaf through and admire, remains a mystery. The pages survived destructive humidity surprisingly well, the prints themselves amazingly well. Once discovered, authorities scrambled to secure safety and protection while the edition was cleaned up and framed for the exhibition.

Goya did the first printing himself from the copper plates he had etched (1814-1816) in a complex chemical process. After his death in 1828, his heirs did a second edition before selling the plates. Six editions later, the plates themselves, which deteriorate with each printing, can no longer be used and are now a museum piece of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Spain. The fifth edition was done in 1921.

A relief seal portrait of the sober, soundless Goya opens the album. Some say La Tauromaquia reveals an inner anger of the artist, showing graphically the violent spectacles of bullfighting by Spanish Moors in the 18th century. He did another set of etchings called Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War), and he is the same Goya of 14 dark, even scary, works in the Prado Museum of Madrid, known as the black Goyas. Or, one could speculate, this may have been a matter of simple box office economics. In 1789, at the age of 43, Goya had been named a painter in the court of Charles IV and a decade later rose to official painter of the palace. But by 1814 times were tight, and the still richly-talented Goya produced a product that would sell.

Marked by the horrors of war and distraught over politics, Goya self-exiled to France in 1824. Still, at age 81, as if all were forgiven and remembering the sweetness of life, he painted a soft work, perhaps his last, of a young milkmaid.

The collection, property of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas of the Ministry of Sports and Culture, will remain on exhibit until the end of February.