7 The Disasters of War

The Disasters were first published in 1863 by the Academy of San Fernando, which invented the title. The eighty published prints, after the frontispiece - ‘Sad forebodings of what is about to happen’ [69] - fall broadly into three groups:

plates 2-47 ‘horrors of war’

plates 48-64 famine

plates 65-80 a radically different group, employing

beasts and monsters in Capricho style to pillory the reactionary restoration of Ferdinand VII.

This was not the form Goya intended the series to take.

His own vision he made explicit in the lavishly bound set he gave to his friend Cean Bermudez, labelled ‘Capricho’ in gold. This carried two further plates, 81 and 82, in the spirit of the third group of prints, and bound in with them three small but powerful engravings of chained prisoners, similar in character to many private drawings he made during the royalist repression. The album carried the inscription - ‘Fatal consequences of the bloody war in Spain against Bonaparte and other striking caprichos {caprichos enfaticos ) in 85 prints’.

The three prisoner prints are much smaller than the others, do not seem organically one with them, carry no numbers and were excluded from the edition published in 1863.

That Goya specifically included them in a set of ‘85 prints’, however, is surely significant. 1 Their inclusion perceptibly sharpens the perspective opened up by the third group which is precisely that of the Restoration, rather than that of the War itself.

A close examination of the engravings strengthens this impression. For while they cannot be assigned exact dates it is clear that they fall into three distinct sequences. 2

The late caprichos enfaticos form a distinctive group, not only in subject and style, but in size and quality. They were

made on good plates of larger and uniform size, generally 17*5 x 21-5 cm. They are unique in that they do not carry an earlier number which Goya carelessly scratched on the others. Their size, uniformity, mature style and obvious kinship with many drawings Goya made during the Restoration indicate that they were made after, possibly quite some time after, the War.

A second group is also uniform in plate size, generally 15*5 x 205 cm. Seventeen of these deal with famine, clearly the terrible famine which ravaged Madrid between September 1811 and August 1812. The quality of the plates varied but was generally superior to that of other war engravings.

The French were driven out of Madrid in August 1812, returned in November and finally quit in March 1813.

In June 1812 Goya’s wife died and in October the family property was divided. It was probably around this time that Goya tried to flee the country, possibly in association with Leocadia Weiss.

Plates of this size carried eighteen engravings of ‘horrors of war’ in addition to those of famine. Their style is distinctive, bolder than that of other war drawings. Unlike many of the others, they do not group small figures centre. Moreover, while horrors are horrors, there seems to be a shift in emphasis. In war prints outside the 15*5 x 20-5 cm group there is only one which shows Spaniards in action against the French. There are scenes of execution and rape, but there is less overt stress on conscious human agency. The impression is of mountains of corpses, flight, wrecked groups of wounded; people are portrayed almost as victims of natural disaster. Within the group of 15*5 x 20-5 cm plates there is a subtle but visible change [75, 76, 77, 78]. Four of them depict Spaniards attacking the French. They concentrate in particular on women in battle. The portrait of Agustina of Aragon, the Joan of Arc of the Saragossa siege, is the only genuinely ‘heroic’ print in the collection [77]. There are no fewer than nine prints of executions, seven by the French which are ghastly atrocities. Others show French soldiers attacking monks.

These are clearly contemporaneous with the famine prints.

In his first numbering Goya intermingled the two sequences. They must be located at the earliest during or more probably after the famine of 1812. The perceptible stress in the war prints on Spanish courage and French atrocity may suggest that they were made after the liberation of Madrid. Certainly this group of famine and war prints form a group ‘late’ in relation to the others.

75. The same. Desastres, 3 (companion to no. 2: with reason or without, plate 5), c.1820

76. And they are like wild beasts. Desastres, 5, c. 1820

77. What courage! Desastres, 7, c.1820

78. And nothing can be done. Desastres , 15, c.1820

The third group is heterogeneous. The plates vary considerably in size. Their quality and that of the materials used seems inferior. Goya was visibly struggling against wartime shortages and disruption. Indeed, he made four of the prints by taking two plates already engraved with landscapes and splitting them roughly in half. Moreover in this group are the only engravings which are dated; three of them carry the date 1810. These are generally assumed to be the earliest.

In 1810, the year he painted the French and the afraneesados , Goya began to engrave the ‘fatal consequences’, working as best he could with whatever materials he could lay his hands on. Some time after the famine of 1812 he engraved on a more uniform set of plates scenes of war and famine of a different kind in a different style. Some time after the war ended he engraved the enfaticos and the prisoners. From these he built the series he gave to Cean Bermudez.

It is not possible to say when he completed the job.

The frontispiece, a late enfatico , has the kneeling man with outstretched arms who figures in many of his drawings and paintings between 1814 and 1823, not least the remarkable Christ on the Mount of Olives of 1819. A drawing in this style greeted the Revolution of 1820 [67,68,69]. It is known that the Disasters plates were re-worked even after the first numbers had been scratched on. He must have been working on the Disparates engravings and possibly even the Black Paintings as he finished the ‘Fatal Consequences’. When he left for France in 1824, the Disparates were interrupted and the Disasters plates stored away by his son. The completion of the latter could be located at any post-war date up to 1823.

On the other hand, internal evidence strongly suggests a date before 1820. The final plates of the series actually published in 1863 have Truth being buried by clerical reaction and carry the query - Will she rise again? [93,94]. True, the last of these plates in Goya’s own scheme, No. 82, is a re-affirmation of human, humane and bucolic values and could be counted to a degree ‘optimistic’, but plate and caption - This is the Truth - are essentially a counter-assertion to the dreadful message of the series as a whole. It can be interpreted as an eve-of-Riego intimation of hope, but Goya followed it with his three shackled prisoners. What is absent is the joyful celebration which infuses his drawings after the revolution which temporarily broke absolutism. Whenever they were physically completed, in spirit, concept and tone, the Disasters close before the Revolution of 1820.

Goya repeated the Suehos-Caprichos process of 1797-9.

He made a false start. On fifty-six of the plates he cut a number in the bottom left-hand corner. The number series is incomplete but it embraces both ‘early’ and ‘late’ war engravings. The plate finally numbered 59, for example, one of the famine scenes, was first given the number 3. On four occasions the number was duplicated; final plates 10 and 19, rape scenes, were both given the early number 19. Twice, the duplicates set in context suggest alternative sequences - either a famine or a rape sub-series - but it is difficult to see the numbering as anything other than a first tentative sketch. Entirely excluded were the enfaticos. Some time after he had made both the early and late war engravings, Goya began to group them into a series, presumably for publication, before the idea of the enfaticos had struck him. When he decided to engrave the enfaticos on the Restoration, he abandoned his earlier numbering scheme, indeed returned to further work on and alterations to the already-numbered engravings.

He then re-shaped the whole series. Final numbers and those captions which, as in all his caprichos, are essential to the work, appear only in the set he gave Cean Bermudez.

The final Disasters , therefore, differ in some important respects from their first version.

Table captionGoya’s first numbering of the Fatal Consequences

Number	Final plate number and caption	Type	Subject
1	34	for a knife	late	garrotting
2	35	no-one can know why	late	multiple garrotting [82]
3	59	what use is one cup	late	famine
4	16	they make use	early	soldiers strip dead
5	57	the sound and the sick	late	famine, social contrast
7	22	all this and more	early	heap of corpses
8	20	treat them and on again	early	wounded
10	41	they escape through flames	early	flight
11	27	charity	early	summary burial [80]
12	24	they’ll still be useful	early	wounded
13	25	these too	early	wounded
14	23	the same elsewhere	early	heap of corpses
15	44	I saw this	early	flight
16	18	bury them and be quiet	early	heap of corpses [79]
17	17	they do not agree	early	officers in battle

18	11	nor these	early	rape
19	10	nor do these	late	rape
	19	there’s no longer time	early	rape
20	13	bitter presence	early	rape
21	30	ravages of war	early	raped women, dead
22	15	and nothing can be done	early	French execution [78]
23	14	hard is the way	early	a hanging
24	12	for this you were born	early	man dying on heap of corpses
25	21	it will be the same	early	carrying off corpses
26	6	it serves you right	early	dying French soldier
27	26	one can’t look	early	execution [2]
28	5	and they are like wild beasts	late	women attack French soldiers [76]
29	9	they don’t want to	late	rape
30	56	to the cemetery	late	famine, carrying corpses
31	60	there is no one to help them	late	famine
32	31	that’s tough	late	French execution
	37	this is worse	late	French atrocity mutilated man impaled on tree
33	47	this is how it happened	late	sack of a church or monastery
34	4	the women give courage	late	women attack French
	58	it’s no use crying out	late	famine
35	61	as if they are of another breed	late	famine, social contrast [83]
36	49	a woman’s charity	late	famine
	2	with reason or without	late	men attack French [5]
37	55	the worst is to beg	late	famine [86]
38	64	cartloads to the cemetery	late	famine [84]
39	36	nor in this	late	French execution
40	43	so is this	late	monks fleeing
41	7	what courage	late	woman mans gun (Agustina of Aragon) [77]
42	33	what more can one do?	late	French atrocity, castration
43	53	he died without help	late	famine
44	63	dead bodies in a heap	late	famine
45	54	they cry in vain	late	famine

Number	Final plate number and caption	Type	Subject
46	51	thanks to the millet	late	famine
47	48	a cruel shame	late	famine
48	3	the same	early	men attack French [75]
49	32	why?	late	French execution [81]
50	52	they do not arrive in time	late	famine
51	39	great deeds! against the dead!	late	atrocity, mutilated bodies
53	46	this is bad	late	French kill monk
55	50	unhappy mother	late	famine
57	38	barbarians!	late	French kill monk
69	69	Nothing, that’s what it says	late	message from the grave [74]

The basic message of the series is clear and remains unchanged from the earlier sequence to the final series: the brutal lunacy of war, the murderous inversion of values, the meaninglessness. The savage irony is all the more effective because of the particular historical irony of this bloody war fin Spain’, but in fact the absence of the enfaticos in this first series makes this correlation less visible. That it was present in Goya’s mind, however, is clear from his choice of prints to start the series. His first choice fell on two engravings of executions by Spaniards. There they are, Spaniards with the sign of the Cross on their foreheads and the symbols of their ‘crimes’ hanging around their necks, strangled in traditional style by their compatriots and ‘no one can know why’ as Goya ultimately commented on the plate which is number 2 in this first series [82]. The character of civil war which the national struggle often assumed is here employed to rivet the mind on the ambivalence of war in a series which in this first version, without the enfaticos , becomes a brutally specific but conceptually generalized statement on war and ‘human nature’.

In effect, Goya had three sets of drawings to work from.

The earlier prints, by and large, are genuinely concerned with ‘consequences’; they portray victims. Their spirit is summed up by the execution - One can’t look - which is No. 27 of this series and No. 26 of the ultimate Disasters. This was clearly one model for the great painting of the Third of May [2]. The great majority of these earlier prints, with their little figures in agony against a sketchy landscape and ominous buildings, are prints of victims, heaps of dead.

79. Bury them and keep quiet. Desastres, 18, c.1820

80. Charity. Desastres, 27, c.1820

stripped dead, patched-up wounded, ‘consequences’ of action which has taken place elsewhere [79,80].

In the later series there is a change. The selectivity and close focus which characterize all the prints here become almost unbearably intense; some of them are very difficult to look at, such is their close and concentrated power. The famine prints, often beautiful, are poignant, laced with social comment and almost elegaic in tone [83,84,85,86]. The horrors however become merciless. Spanish women are shown in action as well

81. Why? Desastres, 32, c. 1820

82. No one can know why. Desastres, 35, c.1820

as suffering rape [76]. The ambiguity is there - the women ‘give courage’ but also ‘fight like wild beasts’ - but the Maid of Saragossa stands a heroine by her gun, the most sickening atrocities are those of the French [77,78,81]; monks as victims are treated more sympathetically by Goya here than they ever were anywhere else (the contrast when the enfaticos were added was all the sharper). It is possible that these drawings were made at the time of final victory and liberation, when Goya was shaping his Second and Third of May, before

83. As if they are of another breed. Desastres, 61, c. 1820

84. Cartloads to the cemetery. Desastres, 64, c.1820

Ferdinand abolished the Constitution and unleashed the clerical reaction. For whatever reason, in some of these later engravings an element of popular and patriotic heroism and pity is injected.

Goya, in sketching his first series, used that element in fact to toughen the ambiguity. He begins with a number of later drawings, the Spanish executions, famine scenes and a stripping of the dead, and then leads us through an appalling sequence of earlier drawings of victims, a pilgrimage through

85. The beds of death. Desastres, 62, c.1820

86. The worst is to beg. Desastres, 55, c.1820

corpses to the first ‘break’ in his No. 17 — They do not agree — a satire on officers arguing in the midst of battle which is almost ‘political’. This is followed by a procession of rapes, executions and corpses. At No. 26 a dying French soldier is displayed and at No. 28 the first action by Spaniards, as women attack the enemy, a scene preceded by an execution and followed by a rape [76].

Thereafter it is difficult to detect any very coherent pattern; no doubt scenes were juxtaposed for artistic effect. One may perhaps detect something of a rhythm in that actions are followed by retribution and endless corpses; the famine drawings intervene more and more frequently and grow into a small series, and in this section, mainly drawn from the later drawings, there is a manic intensification of atrocity.

The numbers give out at 57, but one shattering plate, No. 69, was probably intended as the conclusion. It is the harrowing Nada : a half-buried corpse surrounded by gibbering horrors and the scales of justice, scrawls a message from the grave - Nothing, that’s what it says. This was too much for the 1863 editors, who softened it to a Time will tell [74], Its naked atheist pessimism concludes a sequence which, for all the subtle ambiguity of its particulars, is simple and utterly devastating in meaning.

This pattern was abandoned when Goya drew the enfaticos.

Table captionThe final form of Goya’s Fatal Consequences

Table captionPlate

number	Caption	Type	Subject
1	Sad forebodings of what is to come	enfatico	frontispiece [69]
2	with reason or without (rightly or wrongly)	late	men attack French [5]
3	the same	early	the same [75]
4	the women give courage	late	women attack French
5	and are like wild beasts	late	the same [76]
6	it serves you right	early	dying French soldier
7	what courage!	late	Maid of Saragossa [77]
8	it always happens	enfatico	fallen horseman
9	they don’t want to	late	rape
10	nor these either	late	rape
11	nor these	early	rape
12	for this you were born	early	man dying on heap of corpses
13	bitter presence	early	rape
14	hard is the way	early	hanging
15	and nothing can be done	early	French execution [78]
16	they make use	early	stripping the dead
17	they do not agree	early	officers argue in battle
18	bury them and keep quiet	early	heap of dead [79]
19	there’s no longer time	early	rape

treat them and then on again	early
it will be the same	early
all this and more	early
the same elsewhere	early
they’ll still be useful	early
these too	early
one can’t look	early
charity	early
rabble	enfatico
he deserved it	enfatico
ravages of war	early
that’s tough	late
why?	late
what more can one do?	late
for a knife	late
no one can know why	late
nor in this	late
this is worse	late
barbarians!	late
great deeds! against the dead!	late
makes some use of it	enfatico
they escape through the flames	early
everything is topsy turvy	enfatico
so is this	late
I saw this » v	early
and this, too	enfatico ( probably)
this is bad	late
this is how it happened	late
a cruel shame	late
a woman’s charity	late
unhappy mother	late
thanks to the millet	late

wounded

carrying off corpses heap of dead heap of dead wounded wounded

execution (model for 3 May) [2]

summary burial [80]

Spanish atrocity against Spaniard [6]

the same [7]

raped women, corpses

French execution

the same [81]

French execution, castration

Spanish execution

the same [82]

French execution

French execution, mutilated man impaled on tree

French execution of monk atrocity, mutilated bodies

figure with beast flight

monks in flight the same flight flight

French kill monk

sack of church or monastery

famine

Table captionType Subject

Plate

number Caption

52	they do not arrive in time	late	famine
53	he died without help	late	famine
54	they cry in vain	late	famine
55	the worst is to beg	late	famine [86]
56	to the cemetery	late	famine
57	the sound and the sick	late	famine
58	it’s no use crying out	late	famine
59	what use is one cup	late	famine
60	there’s no one to help them	late	famine
61	as if they are of another breed	late	famine [83]
62	the beds of death	enfatico	grouped with famine scenes [85]
63	dead bodies in a heap	late	famine
64	cartloads to the cemetery	late	famine [84]
65	what’s this hubbub?	enfatico	distraught people before official
66	strange devotion!	enfatico	devotion of saint’s relics
67	this is no less so	enfatico	the same
68	what madness!	enfatico	squatting figure, eating among relics, masks with shadowy figures
69	Nothing, that’s what it says	late	message from the grave [74]
70	they don’t know the way	enfatico	unseeing figures roped together and wandering over a landscape [95]
71	against the general good	enfatico	clerical figure with claws and vampire-like ears filling a ledger [87]
72	the consequences	enfatico	vampire-like creatures suck at a human body [88]
73	feline pantomime	enfatico	cleric bows before a cat and an owl
74	this is the worst!	enfatico	a wolf writes ‘wretched humanity, the guilt is yours’ as people grovel before it and a money-grubbing cleric [91]
75	farandole of charlatans	enfatico	grotesque creatures in clerical garb [92]
76	the carnivorous vulture	enfatico	people drive off huge vulture [90]

Plate number	Caption	Type	Subject
77	may the rope break	enfatico	the Pope on a tightrope [89]
78	he defends himself well	enfatico	a horse attacked by dogs
79	Truth has died	enfatico	Female figure of truth buried by clerics [93]
80	Will she rise again?	enfatico	glowing Truth confronts hostile clerics [94]
81	(separated) cruel monster	enfatico	the beast of No. 40 gorging or disgorging bodies
82	(separated) this is the truth	enfatico	peasant and female figure glowing in peaceful plenty
(83)	Chained prisoner: the imprisonment is as barbarous as the crime
(84)	Chained prisoner: the imprisonment of a criminal does not demand torture
(85)	Chained prisoner: if he is guilty let him die quickly

The entirely novel element of course is the final cluster of enfatico prints. These are often enigmatic; efforts to ‘explain’ them in terms of current events - the horse attacked by dogs, for example, has been related to Napoleon’s Hundred Days - seem unrewarding. It is possible to pin some down.

A preliminary drawing identifies the cleric on a tightrope as the Pope himself, who may also peer between the legs of the flesh-eating Vulture [89,90]. 3 Such a search seems unnecessary; the message of the engravings is clear. They pillory clerical reaction after 1814 as the rule of vampires, wolves, charlatans, sustained by the equally horrible servile superstition of a black pueblo, who ‘do not know the way’ [87, 88, 91, 92, 95]. Their inclusion with the war and famine scenes adds a whole dimension to the sorry panorama of delusion, gives elemental power to the dialectic of reason and unreason already established in the Caprichos twenty years earlier.

The parallel with the Caprichos in style and content is very close. The incorporation of the enfaticos decisively shifts the whole series in a Capricho direction; the label of the Cean Bermudez volume speaks for itself. In any case, the element of ‘reportage’ even in the war and famine scenes has been exaggerated beyond measure. Apart from his brief trip to Saragossa which may find reflection in some of the early

87. Against the general good. Desastres, 71, c.1820

88. The consequences. Desastres, 72, c.1820

engravings, and his escape bid to Piedrahita in 1812, Goya remained in Madrid throughout the war, as schizophrenically ‘loyal’ to its successive rulers as many of his friends. The caption ‘This I saw’ is reserved for two prints. Several of his scenes were also celebrated by lesser artists who

89. May the rope break. Desastres, 77, c.1820

90. The carnivorous vulture. Desastres , 76, c.1820

found far greater immediate favour, precisely because his purpose was not to ‘report’ or edify. The uniform of his soldiers is often sketchy; the soldiers in his drawings seem to bear the same relation to French troops as do John Arden’s soldier-avengers in his play Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance to

91. This is the worst! Desastres, 74, c.1820

92. Farandole of charlatans. Desastres, 75, c.1820

soldiers of the Queen. Goya was drawing and painting ‘disasters’ before war broke out. The war certainly gave him an abundance of new material, but the essential perspective, however elemental it had become, remained that of Moratin’s Logrono Relation.

93. Truth has died. Desastres, 79, c.1820

94. Will she rise again? Desastres , 80, c.1820

The relationship between the Caprichos and the Disparates is even closer. These, the most impenetrable of his engravings and still incomplete when he went into exile in 1824, teem with direct echoes of the Caprichos. They re-work many of the same themes; the plates (those he used for the Tauromaquia

of 1815-16) are larger, and in the concentration he essayed, the prints become monumental. But even the phantasmagorical aspect, the theatrical, guignolesque, recalls the theatre of the absurd of the Caprichos. There is a direct relationship between the later plates of the Disasters and the Disparates and between both and the Black Paintings. The desperate illness of late 1819 cuts across the process, but the plates of both series, the Black Paintings and many of the drawings from some time after 1814 through to exile in 1824, with their constant and characteristic re-working or ‘paraphrasing’ of earlier themes, strongly suggest one massive ‘capricho’ developing and elaborating into new dimensions the perspective that Goya had achieved in the crisis of 1792-9.

Goya’s engraving of the enfaticos and his incorporation of them into the Fatal Consequences sharpened that particular perspective. It was not simply a matter of adding a new series to cover the post-1814 period or of printing a suitable ‘presentiments’ frontispiece in the style of his 1819 painting. Several enfaticos were carefully inserted into the sequences of earlier engravings. A fallen horseman (No. 8), for example, is used to break a sequence of increasingly ‘heroic’ Spanish actions in the early stages to drop the reader into the pit.

The second of his ‘This I saw’ prints seems in fact to be an enfatico deliberately drawn to twin an early plate (No. 45).

Two enfaticos , one of monks in disorder and the classic Beds of Death (Nos. 42 and 62), may originally have had nothing to do with the war sequences on flight and on famine into which they fit [85].

The most striking of the ‘inserted’ enfaticos are Nos. 28 and 29, which introduce Spanish atrocities upon Spaniards.

They are the yoked Populacho couple [6, 7]. They depict a similar scene —a Spanish crowd dragging a man through the streets to inflict a horrible death upon him. The victim is presumably an afrancesado , one of the ‘enlightened’ killed by a ‘black’ populace with the bourgeoisie in ambiguous attendance. But whereas one caption is a curt, dismissive ‘Rabble’, the other baldly states ‘He deserved it’. It is an almost perfect illustration of the duality of the series and it is strongly reminiscent of the burro-pueblo pair of engravings in the Caprichos [8, 9]. It is moreover set in a short sequence which seems a fulcrum to the series. No. 26 is the One can’t look execution which prefigures the Third of May painting [2]; it is followed by Charity, the most searing of the burial prints [80]; then come the enfatico couple of the Two-Spains dichotomy [6, 7], and we are led straight into a sequence of

devastating atrocities. The burro-pueblo is become the People as Beast-Hero.

The final series shows signs of very careful planning, much more rigorous than the first numbering. There is, first, a measure of concentration; the famine prints are grouped [83,84,85,86], so are most of the enfaticos , so are the later war prints of atrocities, so are the earlier ones which meander through heaps of corpses. Other, linking sections are very carefully composed of early, late, and enfatico plates. After the frontispiece, for example, plates 2-7 form a unit.

Unlike the first numbering, which began with executions, this series begins with the insurrection of the Spanish people.

In the first two prints Spanish men fight the French, in the next two, Spanish women; they are unidealized, they kill, but they are the pueblo in arms [75,76]. A dying French soldier is greeted ‘serves you right!’, and then we see Agustina of Aragon the heroine [77]. It is at that point that we are brought crashing down with the enfatico fallen horseman, to confront four rapes, a man vomiting into death, two executions [78] and a stripping of the dead. They do not agree (No. 17) affords a momentary break before we are off again on a Long March through the early prints and their pathetic piles of dead and the broken [79]. At No. 26 we confront the thematic execution, the Charity, the twin Beast-Hero of the people, and are plunged into ten scenes of frenzied atrocity [80,81,82]. An enigmatic enfatico which yokes a woman to a vile beast leads us into a short sequence built up from plates of all periods chronicling flight, refugees, murdered monks and a sacked church which yields abruptly to the long Golgotha of the famine [83,84,85,86]. The last print in that sub-series, in which a young and beautiful girl, legs erotically exposed, is carted off to the cemetery [84], gives place to popular dismay before restored Spanish reaction, and we are into the nightmare of the last enfaticos [87,88,89,90,91,92]. Truth is buried; will she ever rise again? [93,94]. The man-eating monster is confronted with the vision of Truth and peace, and the series ends with the three small shackled wretches who leave us imprisoned.

It is a series of unparalleled power, perhaps the most remarkable and most memorable treatment of war in art.

But the power derives essentially from that dialectic first sketched in the Capnchos. The use of the enfaticos focuses precisely that dialectic, peculiarly Spanish in its intensity. Through Goya’s mind and spirit we are admitted to the travail of the Spanish people in this, their war of independence

and the first of their modern civil wars. Through Goya’s mind and spirit that travail of the Spaniards is made, for us, the travail of ‘mankind’. The crucible is the peculiar strength, the peculiar quality of that mind and spirit, which lie too deep for the historian. But how could Goya ever have achieved transcendence if his mind and spirit had not been those of a particular Spaniard in a particular Spain ?

95. They do not know the way. Desastres, 70, c.1820