Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 14 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'It's a Hard Step!' (Duro es el paso!), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
Plate: 6 in. × 8 1/16 in. (15.3 × 20.4 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Here we see the condemned man about to be hung. What is his crime? We do not know. His clothes appear clean; there are no blood stains or tears; was he just caught up in a sweep in which the French planned to execute a number of Spanish peasants in exchange for the crimes of other peasants rebelling against their invaders or revenging atrocities already done? We do not know; we will not ever know. All we learn is that life is hard and often unjust. To the left, another man swings from the scaffold; to the right, mourners weep for the dead.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 15 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'And there is no help' (Y no hai remedio), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
Plate: 6 in. × 8 1/16 in. (15.3 × 20.4 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
At center, tied to a stake, a blindfolded Spanish man is about to be executed by French soldiers. Behind him, a squadron opens fire on other prisoners. The cycle culminates with the two corpses lying on the earth in the foreground. Goya condensed the three moments to advance the unfolding of the bound victim’s death by firing squad, a story narrated in the present tense. The intruding rifles create the impression of incidental observation.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 16 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'They make use of them' (Se aprovechan), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
Plate: 6 in. × 8 1/16 in. (15.3 × 20.4 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Following the work of the firing squad, the machinery of the war moves on as the dead bodies are stripped of their raiment (might make good cannon wadding) before burial.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 17 from 'The Disasters of War' (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'They do not agree.' (No se convienen.), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
Plate: 6 in. × 8 1/16 in. (15.3 × 20.4 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
While the officers argue about tactics, their men are getting killed.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 18 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'Bury them and keep quiet' (Enterrar y callar), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Two survivors, hands and handkerchiefs stuffed to their faces to block the stench of decay, scan a heap of stripped bodies, now beginning to rot, in the hope of finding a friend or a relative. You probably won't, Goya implies, and if you do, it won't matter: the dead are dead, so just get them in the hole"
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 19 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'There isn't time now' (Ya no hay tiempo), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In the ruins of a house, three soldiers confront the remnant of a family. On the left, a soldier holds a young girl presumably to keep her in place while he sets about raping her. In the middle, a soldier with a sword confronts two women, one praying with hands folded, the other reaching for the sword that has just killed her father or brother; a third woman lies at the soldier's feet, either praying for mercy or beyond prayer; finally, at right, a soldier turns from the corpse to look at the women. Either death or rape or both are about to follow.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 20 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'Get them well, and on to the next' (Curarlos y á otra), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In a broken landscape with heaps of corpses as a backdrop on either side of the central group, a priest prays over the body of a soldier, to his left a praying man; Further to the left, two well-dressed men try to hold up a soldier; one of the men looks up, the other looks down. Heaps of corpses are the new accessory for a Spanish landscape, it would seem. There is no point wasting too much time with them...
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 21 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'It will be the same' (Será lo mismo), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
At left we see three dead peasants and a woman weeping; at right, two men hold another corpse, perhaps a young woman, wrapped in a shroud for burial.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 22 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'Even worse' (Tanto y mas), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
All that's is left of these men and women, soldiers and peasants and gentry, is a heap! One of the bleakest works in the Desastres!
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Many in Francisco de Goya’s coterie were afrancesados (supporters of French rule in Spain). They believed that Spanish politics could not be reformed without Napoleonic intervention. Not surprisingly, Goya never publicly declared where he stood in the fray; as a court painter, he needed a court to paint and thus it was pragmatic of him to remain noncommittal during this uncertain time. The artist’s ambivalence shows in his Disasters of War series. He generalized atrocities by both the French and Spanish, portraying them as physically interchangeable, equating their sins, and leaving their bodies unidentified.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 23 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'The Same Elsewhere' (Lo mismo en otras partes), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Here is a giant heap of the dead and dying...
Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 24 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'They can still be of use' (Aun podrán servir), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
If "they" refers to the living, their use is to clear the battlefield; if it refers to the dead, it could be to form a living wall or to spread death via contagion as they rot.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 25 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'These too' (Tambien estos), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This print, Tambien estos (These Too), shows a roomful of wounded resistance fighters, some in bed and some struggling to stand, dress, and feed themselves. One lies in a grotesque posture, as if scrabbling to rise from the floor or to kick away the sheet hastily thrown over him. Yet if deprived of glory, these men are not without honor. One whose shirttails gape open to bare his backside—the emblem of the vulnerable patient—is being tenderly assisted by others. Of course, in this era before Florence Nightingale’s reforms in the mid-19th century, there would have been no professional nurses to care for the wounded, who largely were left to care for each other. Goya’s composition places them in a harmonious triangle, which balances the scene’s chaos and debilitation.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 26 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'One can't look' (No se puede mirar), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
"Goya produced a dramatic masterstroke. The executioners have vanished altogether, but the threat of their presence just offstage is all the greater for it. All we see of them is a cluster of eight gun muzzles and their fixed bayonets poking in from the right edge of the frame, like a single pointing finger: pure, deadly tools. This has an astonishingly cinematic effect: the small, intrusive shape that, like the turning of a doorknob or the creak of the stair that announces the expected killer, creates panic among the wretched Spaniards who are huddled in the cave. Though 'huddled' is perhaps the wrong word. No se puede mirar is a superb example of Goya's ability to give formal rhythm and focus to what, in another artist's hands, could be a chaotic, undifferentiated lump of bodies. He did this by stressing the angularity of slopes and triangles within the heap. The woman in white, framed by the cave's darkness, rocks back in despair at the same angle given by the back of the man in the traje corto, kneeling, wringing his hands in prayer or despair, his back to the rifles. The triangle of the void between his legs matches the solid triangle of leg belonging to the kneeling man in the foreground—who, though he wears a dark jacket and trousers that places him a social cut above the working class, is as plain and ordinary a member of the pueblo as one could wish to see. In the etchings all individuality, all exuberance of humanity, is concentrated in the victims alone. . . . [T]he perception that war is a despicable and monstruous injustice, an impartial machine that kills men like cattle and, most of the time, leaves no residue of glory behind it, is the prototype of all modern views of war"
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After Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1807 and 1808 brought about the abdication of the Spanish king, violent protests against the French erupted in Madrid. The uprising of May 2, 1808, marked the start of the armed Spanish resistance, which dragged on in guerrilla warfare until 1814. During the war, Goya documented his horror and outrage at the atrocities committed by soldiers and patriots in his series of 80 prints 'The Disasters of War'. Never before had a story of man's inhumanity been told so compellingly, every episode reported with compassion, honesty and respect for the victims. Not until 1863, thirty-five years after Goya's death, was the first of seven posthumous editions of the Disasters published by Spain's Royal Academy, which in 1862 purchased all eighty etched copperplates. More on this work Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 27 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'Charity' (Caridad), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Although these prints are (of course) products of a specific historical moment, there is a tragic immediacy in these images of suffering. I wish these prints only told us about the past — instead, they tell us too much about the present. I cannot look at them without immediately thinking of how much they share in common with photographs coming out of Palestine today. More on The Disasters of War
Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 28 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'Rabble' (Populacho), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The rabble seem to have captured some wounded French soldiers and is proving that it can be as savage as the French themselves.
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Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 29 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'He deserved it' (Lo merecia), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
Dartmouth College
Goya's series chronicled both the abuses of the French soldiers and the Spanish resistance to the war. In these two prints, the artist records moments of opposition by civilians, who enact their revenge on the dead bodies of the invaders. In Plate 28, a man and woman beat and stab at the bound body of a soldier. Meanwhile, in Plate 29, two men drag the corpse of a French fighter. Both dead foreigners’ heads are obscured, even as their bodies become a focus for local anger and desperation. With their faces impassive or seemingly hollowed out by the ongoing horrors of the conflict, the Spanish fighters in these images appear to derive little satisfaction from their vengeance, which cannot undo the immense destruction they have experienced. One of Goya’s titles suggests sympathy with the civilians, proclaiming: He deserved it. More on this work
Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Plate 30 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'Ravages of War' (Estragos de la guerra), c. 1810
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 7/16 in. (25.2 × 34.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The incident unfolds in an instant: a building collapses due to an explosion, and its occupants plunge to the ground. Several details poignantly signal the sudden interruption of normal life, such as the fashionable armchair atop a fallen section of the floor, and the mother embracing the child she was just breastfeeding. Goya re-created this tumultuous interior as if observed at close range from within. The image graphically translates the disintegration of order produced by the blast, which the artist simulates having witnessed. More on this work
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