The Third of May (1808)
This painting has a similar situation to that posed by The Raft of the Medusa years later. While the soldiers are the ones firing the guns, Goya is historically pointing blame towards the french monarchy who made the decision to betray and massacre the Spanish. The brutal nature of war exposed here is also another form of monstrosity. Goya also had a series of drawings known as “The Disasters of War” which detailed out the horrors of war which had previously been underrepresented in the public eye. The monstrous nature of war Itself is not a subject we covered much in class, but artists like Goya and later Picasso embraced its cruelty and monstrosity to great effect. The Third of May is one of the first of Goya’s interrogative and challenging pieces which reached their culmination in his “black paintings”.