Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’

In 1808 the French army, triumphant in much of Europe, began the Peninsular War by invading Spain, where Napoleon installed his brother Joseph as king.  The Spanish army, aided by bands of guerrillas, fiercely fought the French.  For the first time in the history of warfare guerrillas struck a blow, suddenly disappeared and left the army to fight the traditional battles.  In The History of the Peninsular War, William Napier wrote that “Wellington’s small army could not have operated without the diversionary effects of Spanish resistance.”  In 1814, after a series of stunning military victories, the British allies under Wellington drove Napoleon out of Spain.  After the war, the reactionary monarchy of Ferdinand VII regained the throne and restored the old status quo.

Francisco Goya’s collection of etchings  The Disasters of War depicted vivid scenes from the civilian resistance.  They were created between 1810 and 1814, but not published for political and patriotic reasons until 1863—35 years after his death.  Michael Iarocci’s The Art of Witnessing: Goya’s “Disasters of War” (University of Toronto Press, 2023, 281p, $90 hardcover, $35 paperback) introduces, reproduces and analyses 47 of the 83 etchings.  Each one was originally 8×6 inches in size but are reduced in this book to 4×3 inches.  The etchings are placed on the left side.  On the right side, he perceptively comments for three or four pages on the etchings, the satiric and ironic captions, the thematic sequence and the historical background, and adds extensive notes on the scholars’ response at the end of the book.

The prints in this expensive book should have been larger and clearer, like the Dover edition of Disasters (1967).  The very small type is torture-to-read, especially since perusers must constantly shift their eyes back and forth from the text to the print.  But Iarocci does justice to his innovative idea by expertly explaining the obscure details of each etching and illuminating their elusive meaning.

Plate 44: Yo lo vi (I saw this)

Goya’s #44 “Yo lo vi” (I saw it) suggests he had actually seen some of these atrocities. His prints make readers both reluctant and rivetted witnesses to the overwhelming variety of horrific acts.  His razor-sharp lines show the gradations of gruesome death by starvation, disease, wounds, rape and torture; by knife, axe, spear, sword, bayonet and rifle; by hanging, garroting and firing squad; by decapitation, amputation and castration.  He portrays women fighting and dying, dead horses, mutilated bodies, rotting corpses, pillaging the dead, cartloads of bodies headed for the cemeteries and mass burials.  It was not enough for the French to kill the Spanish guerrillas; they had to be tortured, suffer cruel deaths and be displayed on the highways as a warning to potential or actual guerrilla recruits.

Goya’s prints of violence, suffering and death oppose the heroic portrayals of war that for centuries had dominated European art.  He does not portray the consolation of courage or the celebration of victory—only danger and death, bullets and blood.  There are no battles, only the cruel aftermath; no heroes, only victims in that slaughter of the innocents.  Death has to be delivered in the most horribly conspicuous way.  Yet Goya was not, as Iarocci claims, “the first great European realist on the subject of war.”  Jacques Callot’s The Miseries of War (1633) came two centuries before Goya and influenced him.

La Pendaison (The Hanging), the 11th and most famous plate in the series by Jacques Callot,1633

Goya expresses Thomas Hobbes’ theme Homo homini lupus (“Man is wolf to man”).  The artist anticipates the grim photography of Mathew Brady in the American Civil War and of Robert Capa in the Spanish Civil War and World War II.  His horrors also suggest the Nazi hangings of partisans and bodies piled up in the mass graves of extermination camps.  Like Edgar in King Lear, he believes “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ”

Plate 1: Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer (Sad presentments of what must come to pass).

The sequence of prints begins before the outbreak of the Peninsular War, portrays the fighting and famine, and ends with the restoration of an absolute monarch.  #1- “Tristes presentimentos de lo que hacer acontecer” (Sad presentments of what must come to pass) shows a hollow-cheeked man, his eyes raised, arms spread out and chest exposed, kneeling in a crucified position before a swirling dark background.  Like a saint in the wilderness and victim of horrors to come, he prays in vain for peace and prophesies war.

Plate 7: Que valor! (What courage!)

Francisco de Goya, Que valor! (What Courage!), published 1863Goya was one of the first artists to depict women fighting and dying in war.  # 7- “Qué valor!” (What Courage!) portrays the brave Agostina of Saragossa, who faces away from the spectator, with long white hair and a white dress.  She lights the fuse of a long high-wheeled cannon that juts across the center of the print and faces left toward the unseen enemy.  She stands on a pile of her dead comrades who have fallen during the siege of the city (near Goya’s birthplace) in July 1808.  Lord Byron paid tribute to that courageous and victorious woman in Cantos 55 and 56 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812):Scarce would you deem that Saragoza’s tower

Beheld her smile in Danger’s Gorgon face,

Thin the closed ranks, and lead in Glory’s fearful chase.

Her lover sinks — she sheds no ill-timed tear;

Her chief is slain — she fills his fatal post;

Her fellows flee — she checks their base career;

The foe retires — she heads the sallying host.

Goya depicts violent rape, an ancient feature of war.  #9- “No quieren” (They don’t want to)”: The huge watermill on the left, reflected in the river, suggests a powerful force crushing the Spanish people.  In the center a French soldier with an astrakan hat, heavy cloak and sword, grabs a woman face to face and tries to rape her.  She looks away from the spectator, buries her face in his shoulder and claws at his eyes.  Spreading her legs for balance, she shows the outline of her buttocks.  An old lady with a murderous expression tries to rescue her and raises a gleaming dagger to stab the soldier in the back.  Stalin justified the mass rape of German women in 1945 by declaring, “the soldiers have come a long, hard way from Russia to Berlin, and deserve a bit of fun.”

Plate 9: No quieren (They do not want to).

Hanging was a common form of retaliation.  #14- “Duro es el paso!” (The way is hard!): The frequent hangings, which take place without a deep drop and don’t quickly snap the neck, cause death by slow strangulation and asphyxiation.  Soldiers sometimes have to grab the legs of a hanged man and pull him down to make sure he’s dead.  In this print three men pull a bound victim up a rough-hewn ladder to be hanged.  Behind him two dangling men, whose ropes cross behind the ladder, continue to swing at a sharp angle.  A monk with his arms helplessly spread cannot offer either practical or spiritual help.

Goya excels in the grisly varieties of killing.  #15- “Y no hay remedio” (And it can’t be helped):  In this dramatic sequence six French killers (three offstage, with only their rifles showing) are continuing to execute five victims.  One man is half-buried in an open grave, one lies dead on the earth, two are being shot in the background.  In the center a blindfolded man, about to be executed, is tied to a pole and can’t see the corpses of his comrades who surround him.  Our eyes move from the center to the devastation below and behind him.

Plate 15: Y no hay remedio (And it cannot be helped).

#19- “Ya no hay tiempo” (There is no more time)—to live.  In this image of desperation and fear the men are dark, the women white.  Three women are being assaulted by sword-slashing soldiers, who have already killed two people—one a civilian in white clothing who was trying to protect them.  One kneeling woman is grabbed from behind with the soldier’s head appearing behind her neck; two others are watching the outrage and waiting their turn to be stabbed, raped and murdered.  Goya brilliantly reveals their individual expressions of shame, pleading and terror.

Goya also describes what happened after the Spanish were killed.  #27- The bitterly ironic “Caridad” (Charity) describes a ghastly burial scene.  A bent-over worker in black uses a pike to shove a naked body into a shallow grave while his colleague pushes another corpse into the same receptive space.  The stone-faced older man watching this sordid spectacle in the right background may be Goya’s self-portrait.

#30- “Estragos de la Guerra” (Ravages of war) takes place in a bombed-out, collapsed interior, with roof beams and furniture crashing down on the five mangled dead bodies.  In the center a decapitated woman, tumbling upside down like a fallen angel with her arms spread to break her crash, is ambiguously horrific.  The top of her dress looks like a human face and her blood-dripping neck resembles an excreting anus.

Many etchings show the inhumanity of the French.  #36- In “Tampoco” (Neither one) a stiff corpse with a mass of dark hair, closed eyes, gaping mouth, bent neck and dropped trousers hangs from the forked branch of tree.  He’s casually observed by a French officer with a thick black mustache, military uniform, decorated hat and frogged jacket.  Reclining with booted legs stretched out, left arm resting on a rock and supporting his head, he cruelly contemplates his morbid masterpiece.

Plate 37: Esto es peor (This is worse)

#37- “Esto es peor” (This is worse) portrays brutality against a dead man who’s been placed on the stump of a tree that has penetrated his anus.  The muscular naked corpse with a wounded back and severed arm, has a wild mass of black hair and agonized expression of pain.  On both sides of his body the soldiers continue to slaughter their captured victims.

Los desastres de la guerra, plate No. 39,

Goya’s ironic titles express his disgust with the heroic tradition in art.  #39- In “Grande hazaña! Con Muertos!” (Great deeds against the dead) three mutilated and decapitated men are suspended from the branches of a dead tree.  The muscular man tied to the trunk resembles the body of St. Sebastian.  The spread legs of the victim hanging upside down match the V-shaped branches of the tree, and recall King Lear’s description of man as a “poor bare forkéd animal.”  His bushy-haired and heavily mustached severed head looks down from a higher cut-off branch at the body to which it was once attached.  The open palm on his severed arm reaches to the sky and seems to plead hopelessly for help.  The victims had to be tortured, carved up and publicly displayed to terrify the populace.  Iarocci concludes that Goya portrays “the moral as well as physical damage that accompanies wartime violence.”

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani, Impressionist Quartet and a study of the Canadian realist painter Alex Colville. 

He lives in Berkeley, California.

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