Francisco José Goya y Lucientes (Fuendetodos, Spain 1746-- Bordeaux, France 182…

Dr Helmutas Šabasevičius

Lithuanian Institute for Culture Research

Spanish painter Francisco Goya was, in many aspects of his work, remarkably ahead of his time and remains one of the most compelling artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His body of work reflects a wide range of stylistic, aesthetic, and ethical currents of the period. Best known for his portraits, tapestry cartoons, and the unsettling imagery of the Black Paintings, Goya was equally innovative as a printmaker. His major graphic series include Los Caprichos (1797—1798), Los desastres de la guerra (1810—1820), La Tauromaquia (1815—1816), Los Disparates (The Follies, 1815—1823), and Les Taureaux de Bordeaux (The Bulls of Bordeaux, 1824—1825).

Goya’s work was deeply influenced by eighteenth-century artistic traditions, particularly those of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn — especially the latter’s drawings and prints. Several such works were gifted to Goya by his friend and collector Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez. As art historian and Prado Museum curator José Manuel Matilla has observed, both Rembrandt and Goya found in printmaking “a medium that, even if it required technical skill, allowed them to approach aspects of reality or of their imagination more intimately and freely than would have been possible in their painting.”¹Matilla, José Manuel (2025). Goya the Engraver. In: Goya. The Complete Prints. Köln: Taschen: 9. ↩

For Goya, printmaking offered a space for relatively unrestricted artistic and philosophical expression, less constrained by the expectations of patrons. Many of his prints incorporate brief textual captions that move beyond mere description, functioning instead as literary and metaphorical commentary. These inscriptions open an additional channel of dialogue with the viewer, surpassing the conventional explanatory role typically associated with graphic works of the time.

As Matilla further notes, Goya “was a man of his times, thoroughly familiar with the culture and ideological debases of the era, committed initially to the reformative ideas of the Enlightenment and subsequently evolving to adopt more critical and independent positions.”²Matilla, José Manuel (2025). Goya the Engraver. In: Goya. The Complete Prints. Köln: Taschen: 14. ↩

The Disasters of War occupies a central place in Goya’s graphic oeuvre — and indeed in his work as a whole. It may have been inspired in part by earlier print series such as Les misères et les malheurs de la guerre (The Miseries and Misfortunes of War) by Jacques Callot and Schrecken des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (The Horrors of the Thirty Years’ War) by Hans Ulrich Franck.

Although Goya had often criticized the Spanish monarchy and initially supported the French Revolution — hoping that its liberal, secular ideals might take hold in Spain — the brutal conduct of French troops led him to reconsider his position. While he painted several official portraits of pro-French figures in the early nineteenth century, his attitude toward France soon shifted. The French occupation of Spain also became a subject of his painting. Drawing on specific historical events of May 1808 — the uprising in Madrid on May 2 and the execution of Spanish defenders on May 3 — Goya later translated these moments into a painted diptych completed eight years afterward.

By the time he executed these paintings, Goya had already begun work on The Disasters of War, partly inspired by his journey to Zaragoza in October 1808. A number of preparatory drawings for the series survive, executed in red chalk. Rooted in direct observation, these images are also infused with the artist’s imagination and a profound sense of empathy.

Some of the drawings for The Disasters of War were likely made in Zaragoza, others in Madrid, and the series continued to evolve throughout 1809. Engraving began in 1810, when twenty-five plates were executed and signed, and the series was completed in 1815.³Reuter, Anna (2025). Desastres de la Guear and Three Prisoners. In: Goya. The Complete Prints. Köln: Taschen: 246. ↩ The prints generally measure between 140 and 158 mm in height and 170 to 235 mm in width. In producing the series, Goya employed a range of printmaking techniques, including etching, aquatint, drypoint, and lavis. He also created two sets of trial proofs, the more complete comprising eighty-two prints; this set was presented to his friend, the writer Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez. Goya himself referred to the series by a longer and more explicit title: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, y otros caprichos enfáticos (Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte, and Other Emphatic Caprices).

The plates, prepared and preserved by Goya, remained in his home, the Quinta del Sordo, near Madrid. Many bear his handwritten captions, some containing orthographic irregularities. In 1834, the plates and preparatory drawings were rediscovered when Goya’s friend Antonio de Brugada — who had been in contact with the artist during his final years in Bordeaux — returned to Spain to oversee his estate. At that time, eighty plates were recorded and later transferred to the National Intaglio at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.⁴Cf. Catálogo digital Desastres, www.academiacolecciones.com/estampas/francisco-de-goya.php?pag=9&orden=3&direccion=0&serie=estampas-desastres-de-la-guerra; accessed 2026-02-18. ↩ The series was first published in 1863.

Bermúdez’s album comprised eighty-two sheets along with three small-format works, typically regarded as a separate series titled Prisoners. These were not included in the official edition published by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, which initially acquired only eighty plates; the remaining two were later donated by the French collector and Goya specialist Paul Lefort. The Academy also replaced the title originally given by Goya.⁵Reuter, Anna (2025). Desastres de la Guear and Three Prisoners. In: Goya. The Complete Prints. Köln: Taschen: 248. ↩ Further editions of The Disasters of War were printed in 1892, 1903, 1906, and 1937, each in varying quantities.

The Disasters of War represents Goya’s personal response to the wave of violence that engulfed Europe during the military campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte. Although the series remained unpublished and largely unknown for decades after the artist’s death, its iconography and artistic force proved remarkably universal — and, in many respects, prophetic — anticipating the devastation of the wars that would later ravage Europe in the early and mid-twentieth century, as well as in the 2020s.

In 1937, on the eve of World War II, the physician, writer, and art historian Jacques Élie Faure, in his introduction to an Oxford University Press edition of the series, described Goya as “a fierce genius of formal oppositions and spiritual contrasts, absorbed in a supernaturalism which always remained attached to the most sombre aspects of earthly life, worshipping in life all that is most sensual, coarse and brutal, but also most unexpected, voluptuous, verdant and free, attracted by all that, in death, is most repugnant for the eyes and nostrils, but also by that which is best adapted for bringing into agreement the funereal and magnificent harmonies of secular greatness and definite nothingness.”⁶Faure, Elie, Intro (1937). Francisco de Goya. The Disasters of the War. 85 Etchings. Reproduced in actual size. Vienna: The Phaidon Press: 5. ↩ This characterization offers a concise and perceptive synthesis of the themes that define Goya’s mature work, particularly this series of prints.

Like some artists of the early nineteenth century, Goya rejected the heroic and propagandistic conventions of war imagery, instead exposing its catastrophic consequences for individuals ensnared in the machinery of destruction.

The works in the series are typically divided into three thematic groups. The first forty-seven depict specific instances of violence, often showing unarmed civilians subjected to brutality by soldiers. The following sixteen address the famine that struck Madrid in the early 1810s, while the final group reflects the disillusionment that followed the restoration of the monarchy after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The series is structured around the concrete events it evokes and the progression of its central themes — war, famine, and political allegory — suggesting that Goya conceived it as a dramaturgically coherent whole. This is further supported by the fact that the first plate was in fact among the last to be produced.

Many of the images depict physical violence — rape, torture, and murder — frequently inflicted upon women. Plate 7 portrays a historical figure, Agustina de Aragón, who took part in the defence of Zaragoza. Each image functions as a fragment within a larger narrative, composed through telling details and sharpened by captions that intensify the sense of threat to human dignity and life under conditions of war. As cultural historian Michael Iarocci has observed:

One of the more profound truths the Disasters convey is what combat veterans of virtually all wars repeatedly signal to the uninitiated when they return home: you may have some idea of what war is like by looking at pictures, but if you haven’t been there, you cannot fully understand. Goya was much more than the first major European artist to deliver the unvarnished truth of war in his images. He was also the first to explore in sustained fashion the ethical stakes of making and viewing images of atrocity.⁷Iarocci, Michael (2023). The Art of Witnessing. Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 223. ↩

The sheets depicting scenes of famine relate to a specific historical moment: in 1812, the inhabitants of Madrid faced severe food shortages, resulting in the deaths of approximately 20,000 people. Yet Goya renders this catastrophe in generalized terms, avoiding identifiable locations and instead focusing on the emotional weight of death.

The third part of the series introduces more overtly allegorical elements, populated by fantastical figures whose iconography recalls Goya’s later graphic series Los Disparates. Through these strange hybrid creatures, the artist reflects on the aftermath of war: even as violence subsides, evil persists in the form of hypocrisy, deceit, and moral corruption. These themes are conveyed through juxtapositions of human and animal forms, as well as through surreal motifs that expose the pain and injustice concealed beneath a façade of restored order, and the hypocrisy of faith as an ostensible moral foundation.

It is generally assumed that Goya produced the final plates before leaving Spain in 1824. Their inscriptions suggest that truth has perished, while at the same time posing the question of its possible resurrection.

Certain motifs in The Disasters of War recall Goya’s earlier series Los Caprichos, and some compositions draw on established works of art. For example, Plate 7 echoes the Belvedere Torso, while Plate 69 alludes to The Ancient Altar by Giovanni Battista Piranesi.⁸Matilla, José Manuel (2025). Goya the Engraver. From Reality to Fantasy. In: Goya. The Complete Prints. Köln: Taschen: 16. ↩ The gun barrels that intrude forcefully from the right in Plate 15 are reminiscent of visual elements found in Goya’s painting The Third of May 1808 (1814) and in Asmodea (ca 1820—1823) from the Black Paintings series at the Quinta del Sordo.

The artistic power of the series is not defined by its subject matter alone. Its formal qualities are equally crucial: the diversity of compositional strategies, the precision and vitality of line and stroke, and the dramatic interplay of hatched and unworked areas, shadow and light. These elements lend each sheet its autonomy while contributing to the cumulative force of the series as a polyphonic visual statement.

Reflecting on the distinctiveness of the iconography and themes of Goya’s series, the philosopher Javier López-Aló writes:

If eschatology offers an explanation and provides meaning to the experience of events that prove to be unbearable, Goya shows in the Disasters the tragedy of a world which already knows that behind these terrible events nothing remains but the critical and mistrustful reworking of the memory, and the ironic scrutiny of the imagination itself; in short, the tragedy of a world that already knows that after the Apocalypse no redemption will come. Only silence, perhaps.⁹López-Aló, Javier (2019). Alternative Forms of Historical Writing: Concepts and Facts in Goya’s Disasters of War. In: Theories of History History Read across the Humanities, ed. by Michael J. Kelly & Arthur Rose. London: Bloomsbury Publishing: 179. ↩

Goya’s Disasters of War profoundly influenced a number of artists in the mid- and later twentieth century. For example, the motif of the gun barrel reappears in Pablo Picasso’s painting Carnage in Korea (1951). The British artists Jake Chapman (b. 1962) and Dinos Chapman (b. 1966) created eighty-three sculptural works in plastic and fiberglass based on Goya’s prints, including a life-size enlargement of Plate 39 titled Great Deeds against the Dead (1994). In their project Insult to Injury (2003), they directly intervened in Goya’s Disasters of War prints, overlaying the figures with grotesque, caricatured faces.

In the context of Central and Eastern Europe, the series has acquired renewed urgency in the 2020s. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 shocked the world: the massacres and rapes of civilians in Mariupol, Bucha, and other Ukrainian cities have transformed Goya’s two-hundred-year-old reflections on Spain into Europe’s tragic present, exposing the enduring threat of the ineradicable evil lurking within human nature.

In Lithuania, museum holdings include only a few late impressions from Goya’s graphic series. However, audiences had the opportunity to engage more deeply with The Disasters of War through the exhibition Will She Rise Again? Goya’s Etchings from The Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts, held at the Vilnius Picture Gallery in May 2023 and curated by Olena Shostak and Olha Honcharenko. The exhibition featured both Los Caprichos and Los desastres de la guerra, and subsequently travelled to Klaipėda and Kaunas. It formed part of a broader collaboration between Lithuanian and Ukrainian museums aimed at safeguarding Ukrainian cultural heritage from looting and destruction.