Others have created images as terrible as his of man's inhumanity to man, but no other major artist has conceived of a world so comprehensively consumed by hate. Goya seems to have come to take it for granted that a human being with power or authority over another will abuse it to ruin the other to dismember, deprave, despoil, relentlessly, gratuitously. Maybe the scenes in The Disasters of War of the pointless butchery which the victors inflict on the vanquished tell us no more about Goya himself than that, like any humane and rational being, he loathed the excesses of war. Maybe the scenes in the Caprices in which the old sell or corrupt their charges tell us no more about him than that he was a sharp social satirist. His witches' sabbaths where babies and foetuses are roasted are not proof that he assumed, even unconsciously, that all women would rather eat than feed children.
Love is exceptional.
A loving care is portrayed in the painting made in 119 of The Last Communion of Sanjoside Calasanz . The mouth plays a role in Goya's art more prominent than in that of any other major artist. Mouths leer, grin, gape, gasp, moan, shriek, belch. A hanged man's mouth lies open and a woman reaches up to filch his teeth. Grown men stick fingers in their mouths like sucking infants.