Spanish painter Francisco Goya rubs shoulders with modern masters such as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso in an exhibit at Milan's Palazzo Reale.

Goya and the Modern World brings together 184 paintings, drawings and engravings.

It sets out to show how "Goya was a precursor of contemporary art: a disturbing, lucid, scathing, sarcastic personality capable of depicting human nature in all of its power, without any compassion or pity," said art historian Claudio Strinati.

Goya's Self Portrait, loaned by Madrid's Prado Museum, is juxtaposed with his portrait of Eugene Delacroix from the Uffizi Museum in Florence and that of King Charles IV and Queen Maria Luisa of Parma.

They are accompanied by Picasso's Woman with Mantilla.

Other sections of the exhibit place Goya's works alongside those of Joan Miro, Alberto Giacometti and Jackson Pollock.

The finale joins three powerful works: Goya's Christ on the Mount of Olives, Bacon's Three Studies for a Portrait (Peter Beard) and the Red Man with Moustache by Willem de Kooning.

Goya was born in northeastern Spain in 1746 and died in Bordeaux, France, in 1828.

He is perhaps best known for his dramatic depiction of the French repression of a Spanish revolt in 1808 in his paintings Dos de Mayo and Tres de Mayo.

The artist also served as the court painter of the Bourbons of Spain.

Goya and the Modern World is showing at the Palazzo Reale in Milan till June 27.