Goya's grave in Bordeaux was opened in 1888 and his skull was missing; he was reburied in Madrid in 1919 without it

Francisco de Goya died in Bordeaux on 16 April 1828, aged 82. He was buried in the Grande Chartreuse cemetery in the Muguiro family mausoleum, beside his friend and in-law Martín Miguel de Goicoechea. Spain sought his remains from the 1880s for a national pantheon. On 16 October 1888 the Spanish consul, Joaquín de Pereira, had the vault opened. Gustave Labat, secretary of the Bordeaux Société des Amis des Arts, wrote that the coffins had rotted, the bones lay on the floor, and the gravediggers found only one skull, Goicoechea's. Goya's head was gone. The remains went back into the vault for a year. On 3 June 1899 both skeletons were exhumed under a Spanish royal order and sent by rail to Madrid. Goya was reburied at San Isidro on 11 May 1900, then moved to the Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida on 29 November 1919, in a lead box beside Goicoechea's. A quip said to have come from Madrid, "Send Goya, with or without head," is repeated widely but is anecdote^†. Theories include a Bordeaux anatomist taking the skull for phrenology, and a painter, Dionisio Fierros, who dated a painting of a skull 1849^†. The skull has never been found.