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Today, March 30, is Francisco Goya’s birth anniversary.

Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 put Francisco Goya in a bind. Like many other Spanish liberals, he had hailed the French Revolution, and was euphoric about its early, heroic phase. He had also hoped that the Revolution’s emancipatory message would powerfully exercise the Spanish imagination, helping reform and galvanise the corrupt, moribund Spanish state that Goya had come to loathe. But equally, he had an instinctive distrust of authority, and sensed that a regime that ruled by the sword – as the French, an occupying power, was obliged to do in Spain – could hardly be a truly liberating force, even if it had the noblest intentions. 

And ordinary Spaniards found plenty of reasons to resent the new order, including the cloak-and-dagger manoeuvres via which Napoleon installed Joseph Bonaparte, his elder brother, as the new monarch in Madrid. Soon enough, French troops were violently putting down sporadic bursts of resistance erupting across Madrid and other places – until the scattered and often leaderless popular uprisings coalesced into the broader Peninsular War (1808-14) in which the Spanish, Portuguese, and British armies confronted and eventually ejected the French from Spain, restoring the Bourbons to the throne. Civilian Spanish resistance to French rule persisted through the war years with varying intensity and was brutally subdued in most cases. Goya knew what was happening around him, of course, but, hobbled by a near-total loss of hearing and his body battered by recurring illnesses, the sixty-two-year old painter experienced much of that at a certain remove (but for a short visit to strife-torn Zaragova where he might possibly have witnessed some of the horrors of the war at first hand). His later work, though, seemed to belie that enforced distance between the artist and his subject. Indeed, one of the plates (bearing number 44 out of a total of 80) making up the series of etchings we will talk about presently – the series that posterity came to know by the title Los desastres de la guerra (the disasters of war), is captioned Yo lo vi (‘I saw it’).

As conflicted as Goya’s sympathies were, however, he yet elected to stay on as the royal court’s top painter, pledging allegiance to Joseph, the new monarch. Not surprisingly, he was less than prolific during these years, performing his court duties punctiliously, but not with any particular enthusiasm. He drew and sketched as the fancy took him, rendering his impressions and his feelings about the ongoing bloodletting to paper, but stowed much of his work away for the time being, even as he scrupulously attended to royal and other commissions that came his way. It was during this interregnum that Goya started work on his Disasters… series, though it was not until 1820 that he was done with them. 

But what kept Goya preoccupied during the artistically lean years of the Napoleonic occupation burst forth in the open courtesy of two monumental canvases he completed soon after the French army had been driven out of Spain: The Second of May, 1808 and The Third of May, 1808. Both showed Madrid turned upside-down by strife. In Second.., exasperated Madrilenians fall upon their French tormentors with savage fury, while the other painting memorialises the extraordinarily vicious French reprisals. But, though commissioned by the court as a tribute to heroic Spanish resistance to a ruthless aggressor, neither painting, but particularly The Third of May, foregrounds spectacular bravery or spunk. Indeed, The Third… has altogether little to do with elevating patriotic sentiments, emerging instead as a searing indictment of the whole business of war, arguably the first-ever essay in anti-war art in history. This momentous work, we will see in a moment, is not only kindred in spirit to the Desastres… series, it even shares a part of the same aesthetic, though the painting and the etchings belong in very different genres.

The Third of May is a portrait of a dark night on a hillside in or just outside of a  forlorn town animated by gunshots: an army firing squad, the soldiers’ faces hidden from view, are spraying a bedraggled, cowering group of men with a volley of bullets from their menacingly long, bayoneted muskets, while a long line of condemned men meld into the night, waiting their turn to be shot. A bloodied and violently disfigured man lies spreadeagled near the feet of the man about to be shot now. There’s horror on this man’s face, but also defiance, as he stands in a shirt and pants the exact shades of whose white(the shirt) and yellow (the pants) mirror the white and yellow of the only source of light in the night canvas – a lantern’s yellow-and-white casing, his long arms thrown wide out, vaguely Christ-like before crucifixion. The shadowy column of executioners is terrifying in their facelessness, their heads shrouded in mask-like black hats, and in their steely, robotic poses. Raw, incomprehensible, numbing violence seeps from the canvas – leaving no room for corny patriotism or mawkish hero-worship.

Writ large on this magnificent work of art is the message: war degrades and dehumanises, making no distinction between its victims and its perpetrators. And it’s this essential vileness of war and those who make war – together with the dreadful ways it affects all those who get drawn into it – that stares back at you from all the eighty prints that make up the Desasatres… series.  Goya worked on them with a variety of printmaking techniques: etching, aquatint (for the tonal areas), engraving and drypoint. The prints are in stark blacks and whites: the artist has abandoned colour here in favour of a more direct truth he found in shadow and shade. The laconic captions Goya provides to each plate are often darkly ironic.

‘Rightly or Wrongly’.

The series can be divided into three broad thematic groupings: war (from 1 to 47), famine (48-64), and the moral bankruptcy of Spain’s political and cultural elites (65-80). In the war series, plate number 2 above – captioned Rightly or Wrongly – which shows a rebel desperado being killed by masked troopers while a crowd recoils in fear, was clearly prefigured by The Third of May. Plate no 3 below , titled Likewise, shows a Spanish civilian about to hack off the head of a felled French soldier in demented fury.

Plate 9 – They Do Not Want To – shows a knife-wielding elderly Spanish woman trying to save a younger woman from a molesting French soldier’s grasp. Rape and violence on women were rife in Madrid during the war years and many of the etchings recall that brutality.                               

A blindfolded man being executed by a firing squad in no 15 – And there’s no remedy – harks back again to The Third of May.

And in plate number 18, ‘Bury them and keep quiet’, a couple – the woman covering her eyes and the man holding his nose, stand on billowy open ground upon a mound of corpses that have been stripped bare of everything including their clothes.

‘What a great deed! With corpses.’

Plate 39 which, with bitter irony, Goya captions What a great deed! With corpses, is a stomach-turning drawing of several brutally mutilated bodies and hewn limbs strung up on the hacked branches of a tree whose luxuriant foliage seems to mock the twisted, mangled corpses.

The famine sub-series shows Madrid beleaguered by starvation and disease during the war years. The Madrid famine took more than 20,000 lives. In plate no 59 (Of what use is a cup?), two famished women, one of them clearly dying, lie sprawled on the ground while a third woman kneels by their side, perhaps offering them water to drink.

‘The worst is to beg’.

Plate 55 (The worst is to beg), on the other hand, depicts an emaciated family at the end of its tether,  now thrown upon others’ mercy for food.                                  

The final group of etchings is a withering commentary on how Spain’s political and cultural elites continued to deport themselves after the war. Liberals’ high hope that the post-war Spanish state would be obliged to reform itself, however imperfectly, was soon dashed to the ground. The Inquisition returned to re-assert its hideous hold on society and judicial torture threatened to become  common currency once again. Self-aggrandisement and corruption ran riot across the establishment, and an overweening, pompous but inept monarch – Ferdinand VII – continued to pursue narrow self-interest to the detriment of the national good. Goya furiously lampooned the regent and his cabal. Plate 71 – captioned Against the common good – presents a winged monster sitting on a rock and writing something in a giant book. Is that a royal edict he is signing off on, an edict as stupid as it is base?       

‘Against the common good’.

The outrage and the disillusionment of the Spanish people in the aftermath of the war is brought home even more tellingly by plate 74 – This is the worst of all! A friar kneels before a beast which is part wolf and part donkey, while the animal writes this in the scroll lying on his lap: Wretched humanity, the fault is all yours. Those arrogant words are clearly directed at the long line of hungry and distraught commoners who crowd around the scene, desperately hoping for succour. 

‘This is the worst of all!’

This last group of etchings – referenced by Goya as caprichos emfaticos (‘emphatic caprices’) – clearly links back to the other series of engravings Goya had published in 1799. Pungently, if ambiguously, titled Los Caprichos (Caprices), that earlier series had held up the hypocrisies and corruptions, the depravities and iniquities of the Spanish state and all its institutions to such lacerating ridicule that pushback was  swift and strong, obliging Goya to withdraw the series post-haste  from the market. (It’s quite another matter that the astute painter later found a way of turning a profit on this work of corrosive satire by ‘gifting’ all the unsold sets to, of all people, King Charles IV himself.  The spectacularly stupid regent never saw through this inspired gambit, and returned the ‘favour’ by granting a generous pension to the painter’s son).

Also read: An Incendiary Court Painter, Would Francisco Goya Have Survived Today’s India?

The Inquisition had been cut to the quick by the cheeky, indeed mocking and pillorying,  manner in which Goya had picturised the churh in Los Caprichos. Years later, one of Ferdinand’s senior courtiers ia understood to have told Goya  that he had raised the hackles of so many powerful men in Spain that he might well have been garrotted – but for his status as the top court painter. So, this time around, Goya was not about to take any chances. He had poured into the Desasatres… series all that he felt about the rampaging insanity around him. The etchings were his catharsis, and now, his mind purged of the terrible bitterness and rage and disappointment that bore down on him for so long, he could breathe more freely. But he was not going to make the mistake of publishing the series, then or later. He had burnt his fingers once, and once was more than enough.

So the Desastres ..were kept under wraps during Goya’s lifetime and till much later. In fact it was not until 1863 – or a full 35 years after the painter’s death – that Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando put out the first edition of this formidable body of Goya’s work. As extraordinary as this interlude may look to us today, let’s not forget that even that other Goya masterpiece – The Third of May – languished in relative obscurity in Museo Prado’s lockers for many years, and it was only in 1872, or 44 years after Goya’s passing, that it was listed in the museum’s published catalogue for the first time. This, though The Third of May had actually been commissioned by the court. What we know for sure is that Ferdinand VII’s tastes in art, such as they were,  were shaped by neo-classicism, which may have been why he didn’t take kindly to this stunning painting which showcased hoi polloi. And no question that  The Disasters of War would have been beyond the pale for the king.

They would have been beyond the pale not only because of the stinging critique of the Spanish state, its institutions and its elites that some of the etchings spoke to. The king, his court and the entire Spanish aristocracy would have been outraged by Goya’s treatment of war itself. In Desasatres…war is neither heroic nor ennobling – it’s creepy, dehumanising, irrational. Even patriotic war, Goya clearly suggests, can be as degrading as a war of aggression. The etchings blur the line between perpetrator and victim so completely that often one side cannot be told from the other. Surely, the king couldn’t have been amused to discover that Goya believed war was necessarily an orgy of violence, no more.

As West Asia lurches dangerously towards a full-blown conflagration, one side would have us believe they are waging the war to preserve civilisational values that the West holds dear. Aside from the delicious irony that it’s the same side which is the aggressor in this war, these modern-day crusaders seem blissfully unaware that even if their war were to be a just one – which most certainly it is not – the orgy of violence would still have corroded their presumed moral primacy. It’s all to the good that these deluded warmongers are ignorant of this profound truth. Let them preserve that ignorance zealously. And let them not come within miles of Francisco Goya’s remarkable book of etchings on War.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

© The Wire