page_title: The Disasters of War
section_title: Technique and style
hierarchical_section_title: The Disasters of War / Technique and style
caption_attribution_description: English: Los desastres de la guerra, plate No. 37, (1st edition, Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1863)
context_page_description: The Disasters of War is a series of 82 prints created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya. Although Goya did not make known his intention when creating the plates, art historians view them as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular War of 1808–1814 and the setbacks to the liberal cause following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814. During the conflicts between Napoleon's French Empire and Spain, Goya retained his position as first court painter to the Spanish crown and continued to produce portraits of the Spanish and French rulers. Although deeply affected by the war, he kept private his thoughts on the art he produced in response to the conflict and its aftermath. He was in poor health and almost deaf when, at 62, he began work on the prints. They were not published until 1863, 35 years after his death. It is likely that only then was it considered politically safe to distribute a sequence of artworks criticising both the French and restored Bourbons.
context_section_description: Detailing and protesting the ugliness of life is a common theme throughout the history of Spanish art, from the dwarves of Diego Velázquez to Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937). Reflecting on The Disasters of War, biographer Margherita Abbruzzese notes that Goya asks that the truth "be seen and ... shown to others; including those who have no wish to see it .... And the blind in spirit stay their eyes on the outward aspect of things, then these outward aspects must be twisted and deformed until they cry out what they are trying to say." The series follows a wider European tradition of war art and the examination of the effect of military conflict on civilian life—probably mostly known to Goya via prints. This tradition is reflected especially in Dutch depictions of the Eighty Years' War with Spain, and in the work of 16th-century German artists like Hans Baldung. It is believed Goya owned a copy of a famous set of 18 etchings by Jacques Callot known as Les Grandes Misères de la guerre (1633), which record the devastating impact on Lorraine of Louis XIII's troops during the Thirty Years' War.
  The dead man in plate 37, Esto es peor (This is worse), forms a mutilated body of a Spanish fighter spiked on a tree, surrounded by the corpses of French soldiers. It is based in part on the Hellenistic fragment of a male nude, the Belvedere Torso by the Athenian "Apollonios son of Nestor". Goya had earlier made a black wash drawing study of the statue during a visit to Rome. In Esto es peor he subverts the classical motifs used in war art through his addition of a degree of black theatre—the branch piercing the body through the anus, twisted neck and close framing. The man is naked; a daring factor for Spanish art in the 19th century, during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Art critic Robert Hughes remarked that the figures in this image "remind us that, if only they had been marble and the work of their destruction had been done by time rather than sabres, neo-classicists like Menges would have been in aesthetic raptures over them."
  Goya abandons colour in the series, believing that light, shade and shadow provide for a more direct expression of the truth. He wrote, "In art there is no need for colour. Give me a crayon and I will 'paint' your portrait." He uses line not so much to delineate shape but, according to art historian Anne Hollander, "to scratch forms into existence and then splinter them, as a squinting, half blind eye might apprehend them, to create the distorting visual detritus that shudders around the edge of things seen in agonized haste .... This 'graphic' kind of clarity can be most sharp when it is most jagged." The immediacy of the approach suited his desire to convey the primitive side of man's nature. He was not the first to work in this manner; Rembrandt had sought a similar directness, but did not have access to aquatint. William Blake and Henry Fuseli, contemporaries of Goya's, produced works with similarly fantastical content, but, as Hollander describes, they muted its disturbing impact with "exquisitely applied linearity ... lodging it firmly in the safe citadels of beauty and rhythm."
  In his 1947 book on Goya's etchings, English author Aldous Huxley observed that the images depict a recurrent series of pictorial themes: darkened archways "more sinister than those even of Piranesi's Prisons"; street corners as settings for the cruelty of the disparities of class; and silhouetted hilltops carrying the dead, sometimes featuring a single tree serving as gallows or repository for dismembered corpses. "And so the record proceeds, horror after horror, unalleviated by any of the splendors which other painters have been able to discover in war; for, significantly, Goya never illustrates an engagement, never shows us impressive masses of troops marching in column or deployed in the order of battle .... All he shows us is war's disasters and squalors, without any of the glory or even picturesqueness."
  The Disasters of War is the second of Goya's four major print series, which constitute almost all of his most imp
caption: Plate 37: Esto es peor (This is worse). In the aftermath of battle, the mutilated torsos and limbs of civilian victims were mounted on trees, like "fragments of marble sculpture".[7]
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