ular. (Carlos IV acquired a set in return
for granting Goya’s son a pension.) He
spared no class—O.K., except the ti-
tled—in his burlesques of donkey-headed
professionals, superstitious peasantry,
female and male poseurs, hypocritical
clerics, and fools who, perhaps because
so lost in delusion, verge on transmog-
rifying out of human form. In a rare
public statement, advertising the series,
Goya coolly declared as his targets “the
innumerable foibles and follies to be
found in any civilized society, and from
the common prejudices and deceitful
practices which custom, ignorance, or
self-interest have made usual.” Note the
fatalism in that “any civilized society.”
If buyers of the works fancied them-
selves superior to the characters de-
picted, Goya surely didn’t mind; but you
know he had his doubts.
No public welcome could be counted
on for the “Disasters of War,” which
weren’t published until thirty-five years
after Goya’s death. He shared them pri-
vately, giving a set of proofs to a friend
who inscribed it, laconically, “Fatal con-
sequences of Spain’s bloody war with
Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices.”
Understatement! Murder and dismem-
berment, rape, desecration of corpses,
and ghastly tortures multiply. It is nat-
ural to assume outrage in the author of
visions so terrible. But what freezes my
blood is an equanimity that sublimates
rage and sorrow at what people can—
and will—do to other people when civ-
ilization’s thin crust fissures.
Visiting war zones around Madrid,
Goya witnessed scenes of the carnage;
and he was present for the catastrophe,
in 1811, of a famine that filled the city
with desperate, diseased, and dying ref-
ugees from the despoiled countryside.
History is replete with war and starva-
tion, but nothing else in art before or
since—including, to my mind, photog-
raphy and film—compares with the “Di-
sasters” for penetrating hurt. The pic-
tures are something more, less, and other
than what we think of as protest art.
Working up his nightmare scenarios
stroke by stroke, as if from the inside
out, he vivifies both the suffering of cru-
elty and the delirium of inflicting it,
without any allowance for a rote response.
Nor did he affix blame. One of his sar-
donically bland captions, “Rightly or
wrongly,” withholds the verdict on a
scene of soldiers about to kill two blade-
wielding men who, for all we know, may
be patriotic guerrillas or mere criminals.
Other captions—“There is no one to
help them”; “What more is there to
do?”—visit contempt on the impotence
of the uninvolved. The same petrifying
dreadfulness marks those intermittent
engravings which impute monstrous-
ness—embodied by eruptive owls or
witches—to the dreaming states of the
putatively rational. Goya doesn’t indict
the evils of individuals and groups; he
amasses evidence of universal depravity.
He added to the series compulsively,
using battered, pitted, or otherwise flawed
copper plates to etch when good ones
fell subject to wartime scarcity. The sub-
limity of his skill occasions no relief, but,
rather, the opposite. The last turn of the
screw is your aesthetic delectation.
Goya had been on hand for the French
invasion, which, in 1814, informed two
astounding paintings of an uprising fo-
mented by the dethroned Ferdinand VII,
“The Third of May 1808” and “The Sec-
ond of May 1808.” I cite the second date
first because the image, a massacre of
Spanish citizens by a French firing squad,
is so routinely regarded as an antiwar
icon on a par with “Guernica.” Its cen-
tral figure, arms raised in hopeless sup-
plication, feels at once a bit Christlike
and a lot like a guy who is appalled to
find himself in the wrong place at ex-actly the wrong time. Now consider “The
Second of May,” a street scene of citi-
zens frenziedly assaulting French forces.
Their targets prominently include Mam-
luk cavalry from Napoleon’s Imperial
Guard. Possibly Muslim, do those figures
touch a nerve of Spain’s expulsion of its
Moors two centuries earlier? (Fanatic re-
ligious intolerance had been one factor
in the nation’s decline from a cosmopol-
itan empire to a chew toy for armies.)
We can’t know what Goya had in mind
for the picture, other than commonplace
lunacy. But it wasn’t propaganda.G
oya seems to have been a good
enough man who led a decorous
enough life, though hot-tempered in
such practical matters as being paid for
his work—reasonably, considering his
early memories of poverty and his ob-
ligation to support members of an ex-
tended family after the death of his in-
testate father, in 1781. There’s a lingering
suspicion of homosexuality regarding
his primary and, perhaps, only close
friend, a never-married Zaragoza busi-
nessman named Martín Zapater. When
apart, they corresponded constantly and
longed for each other’s company. But
Zapater fell silent when Goya became
hysterical during a case of smallpox in
his remaining heir, Javier, and pelted his
friend—“oh my soulmate”—with letters
of hyperbolic devotion. ( Javier survived,“What did you expect from a budget airline?”