The Disasters of War

The final 17 reflect the bitter disappointment of liberals when the restored Bourbon monarchy, encouraged by the Catholic hierarchy, rejected the Spanish Constitution of 1812 and opposed both state and religious reform.

The reigning Spanish sovereign, Charles IV, was internationally regarded as ineffectual,[9] and his position at the time was threatened by his pro-British heir, Crown Prince Ferdinand.

Napoleon took advantage of Charles's weak standing by suggesting the two nations conquer Portugal—the spoils to be divided equally between France, Spain and the Spanish Prime Minister, Manuel de Godoy, who would take the title "Prince of the Algarve".

Seduced by the French offer, Godoy accepted, failing to detect the true motivations of either Napoleon or Ferdinand, who both intended to use the invasion as a ploy, to seize power in Spain.

Ferdinand had been seeking French patronage,[12] but Napoleon and his principal commander, Marshal Joachim Murat, believed that Spain would benefit from rulers who were more progressive and competent than the Bourbons.

[15] Several of Goya's friends, including the poets Juan Meléndez Valdés and Leandro Fernández de Moratín, were overt afrancesados: the supporters (or collaborators, in the view of many) of Joseph Bonaparte.

Critic Philip Shaw notes that the ambiguity is still present in the final group of plates, saying there is no distinction between the "heroic defenders of the Fatherland and the barbaric supporters of the old regime".

[31] In these plates, Goya's focus is directed away from the generalised scenes of slaughter of anonymous, unaligned people in unnamed regions of Spain; he turns towards a specific horror unfolding in Madrid.

Goya's focus is on the darkened masses of dead and barely alive bodies, men carrying corpses of women, and bereaved children mourning for lost parents.

[a 4] Completed between 1813 and 1820 and spanning Ferdinand VII's fall and return to power, they consist of allegorical scenes that critique post-war Spanish politics, including the Inquisition and the then-common judicial practice of torture.

By March, the king was forced to agree, but by September 1823, after an unstable period, a French invasion supported by an alliance of the major powers had removed the constitutional government.

As the series progressed, Goya evidently began to experience shortages of good quality paper and copper plates and was forced to take what art historian Juliet Wilson-Bareau calls the "drastic step" of destroying two etched and aquatinted landscapes, likely from the first years of the century,[49] from which very few impressions had been printed.

[a 12] Detailing and protesting the ugliness of life is a common theme throughout the history of Spanish art, from the dwarves of Diego Velázquez to Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937).

It is believed Goya owned a copy of a famous set of 18 etchings by Jacques Callot known as Les Grandes Misères de la guerre (1633), which record the devastating impact on Lorraine of Louis XIII's troops during the Thirty Years' War.

[59] The dead man in plate 37, Esto es peor (This is worse), shows the mutilated body of a Spanish fighter spiked on a tree, surrounded by the corpses of French soldiers.

In Esto es peor he subverts the classical motifs used in war art through his addition of a degree of black theatre—the branch piercing the body through the anus, twisted neck and close framing.

[61] Art critic Robert Hughes remarked that the figures in this image "remind us that, if only they had been marble and the work of their destruction had been done by time rather than sabres, neo-classicists like Menges would have been in aesthetic raptures over them.

"[63] He uses line not so much to delineate shape but, according to art historian Anne Hollander, "to scratch forms into existence and then splinter them, as a squinting, half blind eye might apprehend them, to create the distorting visual detritus that shudders around the edge of things seen in agonized haste ....

William Blake and Henry Fuseli, contemporaries of Goya's, produced works with similarly fantastical content, but, as Hollander describes, they muted its disturbing impact with "exquisitely applied linearity ... lodging it firmly in the safe citadels of beauty and rhythm.

"[65] In his 1947 book on Goya's etchings, English author Aldous Huxley observed that the images depict a recurrent series of pictorial themes: darkened archways "more sinister than those even of Piranesi's Prisons"; street corners as settings for the cruelty of the disparities of class; and silhouetted hilltops carrying the dead, sometimes featuring a single tree serving as gallows or repository for dismembered corpses.

[67] His first series, the 80-plate Caprichos, were completed between 1797 and 1799 to document "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and ... the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual.

[75] According to Robert Hughes, as with Goya's earlier Caprichos series, The Disasters of War is likely to have been intended as a "social speech"; satires on the then prevailing "hysteria, evil, cruelty and irrationality [and] the absence of wisdom" of Spain under Napoleon, and later the Inquisition.

[76] It is evident Goya viewed the Spanish war with disillusionment, and despaired both for the violence around him and for the loss of a liberal ideal he believed was being replaced by a new militant unreason.

[29] The art historian Lennard Davis suggests that Goya was fascinated with the "erotics of dismemberment",[78] while Hughes mentions plate 10 in Los disparates, which shows a woman carried in the grip of a horse's mouth.

[79] Goya sought to depict this modern mode of warfare, breaking down, by any means necessary, of the enemy's morale, and this includes disturbing images of rape against the walls of ruined buildings and in broad daylight.

[80] Despite being one of the most significant anti-war works of art, The Disasters of War had no impact on the European consciousness for two generations, as it was not seen outside a small circle in Spain until it was published by Madrid's Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1863.

Goya was seen as a proto-Romantic in the early 19th century, and the series' graphically rendered dismembered carcasses were a direct influence on Théodore Géricault,[82] best known for the politically charged Raft of the Medusa (1818–19).

Luis Buñuel identified with Goya's sense of the absurd, and referenced his works in such films as the 1930 L'Âge d'Or, on which he collaborated with Salvador Dalí, and his 1962 The Exterminating Angel.

[84] For decades, Goya's series of etching served as a constant point of reference for the Chapman brothers; in particular, they created a number of variations based on the plate Grande hazaña!

[85] The Chapmans described their "rectified" images as making a connection between Napoleon's supposed introduction of Enlightenment ideals to early-19th-century Spain and Tony Blair and George W. Bush purporting to bring democracy to Iraq.

A bearded man in clerical vestments tied to a stake on a platform. He is squatting and his hands are bound. In the background is a large group of people, standing below the platform, with indistinct faces.
Plate 34: Por una navaja ( For a clasp knife ). A garroted priest grasps a crucifix in his hands. Pinned to his chest is a description of the crime for which he was killed—possession of a knife.
A Spanish civilian man holds a hatchet over his head, and is about to strike the heads of his kneeling captives, who are defeated soldiers in uniform.
Plate 3: Lo mismo ( The same ). A Spanish civilian about to decapitate a French soldier with an axe. [ 1 ]
A scene of an execution at night with a city in the background. On the left is a group of civilians in varying states of despair. The focal point is a man whose white shirt is lit by a lantern. He throws his arms in the air and glares at the firing squad. Corpses lie on the bloodstained ground. On the right a row of soldiers, seen from the back, take aim.
In The Third of May 1808 , along with its companion work The Second of May 1808 , Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808. [ 10 ] Both were produced in 1814, while the print series was in progress.
Half-length portrait of Wellington turned slightly to the left, wearing 18th-century British military officers uniform and many decorations, including several ribbons across his chest and a large star.
Francisco Goya , Portrait of the Duke of Wellington , 1812–14. [ 14 ] During the Peninsular War , the British, led by Wellington, led a proxy war against Napoleon's marshals and the Imperial French Army .
A lone figure of a man on his knees in ravaged and torn clothes, looks upward towards heaven in despair.
Plate 1: Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer ( Sad forebodings of what must come to pass ). This plate was from one of the last groups to be created. [ 24 ]
A woman lies dead, demons dance, spectres watch and celebrate; men pray and wring their hands in grief; while shafts of powerful light emanate and shine from her corpse/body or will she rise to live again, perhaps she is not quite dead yet.
Plate 80: Si resucitará? ( Will she live again? ) The figure is "Truth", from plate 79. A woman is shown lying on her back, bathed in a halo of light before a gathering mob of hooded monks, while a masked figure beats the ground with a weapon. [ 1 ]
Three elderly men strain under the weight of the church statue that they carry upon their shoulders. They appear to slowly flee, with others also carrying church relics in the distance from danger and destruction
Plate 67: Esta no lo es menos? ( This is no less curious )
In the distance the town, people fleeing on horseback and by foot. A woman holding one child in her arm reaches for another who has fallen to the ground; as an army approaches.
Plate 44: Yo lo vi ( I saw this ) from the published edition, with surface tone over the landscape, sky, and woman's dress. In the proofs printed under Goya's supervision, there is no tone. [ 48 ]
People fleeing in panic from burning buildings in the background. Men and women some carrying each other run into the night, amidst chaos and terror.
Plate 41: Escapan entre las llamas ( They escape among the flames ). Men and women some carrying each other run into the night, amidst chaos and terror.
A dismembered and mutilated corpse is impaled on the branches of a tree.
Plate 37: Esto es peor ( This is worse ). In the aftermath of battle, the mutilated torsos and limbs of civilian victims were mounted on trees, like "fragments of marble sculpture". [ 7 ]
Four or five men fly with contraptions resembling bat's wings attached to their arms.
Plate 13 from the "Disparate" series; Modo de volar ( Way to fly ), 1816–1823. In the third grouping of plates in The Disasters of War Goya returned in part to the fantastical imagery he had explored in the Caprichos .
The bodies of captive men hang from trees while soldiers and civilians look on. A man to the right comforts a woman.
La Pendaison ( The Hanging ), a plate from French artist Jacques Callot 's 1633 series Les Grandes Misères de la guerre . It is likely that Callot's etchings of a disorderly army were an influence on Goya.
Plate 7– Que valor!