A revolutionary image of war

Francisco Goya was the first truly modern painter. Though born in the high Enlightenment—the so-called “Age of Reason”—he lived well into the Romantic Era, with its emphasis on subjectivity and the irrational. His own works did much to hasten the break with established artistic tradition which occurred in the early 19th century. Before him, artists were mainly concerned with depicting the reality of the world outside themselves—and even when they painted mythological subjects or scenes from works of fiction, they employed a Neoclassical style inherited from the Renaissance that aimed for objectivity in proportion and perspective.

Goya, on the other hand, seriously examined his own responses to the world around him. His many paintings of life at the Spanish court consistently betray his own feelings toward their subjects, and his famed series of etchings known as The Caprices sharply satirizes the beliefs and attitudes of contemporary Spanish society in a way that had rarely been seen before.

Visitors admire the painting at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Daniel Kalker / Picture-Alliance / DPA / AP

Some of Goya’s most personal works were made in response to the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. In his painting The Third of May 1808, Goya achieves a tour de force of symbolic narrative, recording both his own feelings about his subject and those of his nation.

The painting depicts a particularly egregious atrocity perpetrated by Napoleon’s soldiers in Madrid. The French armies had occupied Spain with the intention of installing a puppet government, and the people of Madrid heard that the last of the Spanish royal family would be deported to France. On May 2, the city erupted into rioting. The rebellion was brutally crushed. Hundreds of Spaniards were imprisoned, and anyone with a weapon—even craftsmen with sewing scissors or kitchen knives—were shot on the night of May 3. Spanish patriots continued to resist the French for the next few years, and this first wave of rebels came to be seen as heroes.

Goya’s painting movingly captures the pathos of the citizens of Madrid as they are led to their slaughter in front of a firing squad, and Goya subtly manipulates the viewer into sharing his own sensibilities. His ability to evoke this emotional response makes this painting a masterpiece. Goya does not soften the gruesome scene with displays of painterly skill or technical virtuosity. His colors are stark and muted, except for the lurid glow from the lamp and the rivulets of the martyrs’ blood. Abandoning his classical training, he leaves his brushwork coarse, as if he were quickly sketching so as not to lose the immediacy of painful feeling.

Napoleon’s soldiers are identical and anonymous, lined in a ruthlessly precise row. Their act of killing is machinelike and inhuman. None of their faces can be seen; instead, Goya emphasizes the cold steel of their gun barrels and the repetitive shapes of their uniforms. The citizens of Madrid, on the other hand, carry expressions—frightened, heroic, sorrowful—which clearly signal to the viewer that these are real people who share a common humanity with us. They are shown as individuals, distinct in dress and comportment. The central figure, dressed in white with arms outstretched and wounds on his palms, alludes to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross—turning these rebellious Spaniards into an echo of the most famous example of unjust killing.

Before Goya, war paintings were often made by the victors to celebrate their own exploits of bravery on the battlefield. Goya shifts the focus from the victor to the vanquished and cuts through the proud sentimentalism and the focus on power and might, which marked his era’s conventional portrayals of war.

This expressiveness opened a way for other artists to experiment with technique so as to elicit immediate emotional effects, not only in paintings of war, but in other genres as well.