The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Francisco Goya · Los Desastres de la Guerra · eighty-two etchings worked with aquatint, printed from copper plates · small horizontal plates of roughly one size, each with a short engraved caption beneath the image · made about 1810 to 1820 and never issued by Goya; first published in 1863 by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, with eighty plates, plates 81 and 82 joined to the series later · the unit scored is the series as one work, the eighty-two in the order now standard, as the image stands in the first edition and Goya’s proofs; the copper plates survive, and the later editions, the preparatory drawings and the other print series are context
Mode
Print series as witness; reportage, lament and political satire in one numbered sequence, each plate with its caption
Mythos
A passion of a people: the presentiment in darkness, the bodies bound to stakes and trees, the burial of Truth and the question of her rising
Phase
From 1808 to the restoration: the war, the famine in Madrid of 1811 to 1812, and the reaction under Ferdinand VII; made about 1810 to 1820, published in 1863
Presentation
Eighty-two etchings worked with aquatint, small horizontal plates of roughly one size, each with a short engraved caption; eighty in the first edition, two joined later
Register
Dread, plate after plate: the etched line fast and broken, the aquatint grounds smoky and flat, the blank paper as light and as nothing
Scale
A nation in war, famine and reaction, at the size of a sheet held at reading distance
Governing Proposition
Eighty-two small etchings, held in the hand one at a time, each answered by a caption of a few words, carry a war from a kneeling man’s presentiment in darkness through reprisal, execution, mutilation and flight, into a starving city where no soldier is, and on into a peace that buries Truth. The wager of the series is that war is atrocity indifferent to its cause, that the image of it can be evidence without a side and without a hero, and that the voice of a witness muttering beneath the plate, “Yo lo vi”, can carry what no victory piece could: a wager its maker paid for by keeping the plates from any public in his lifetime.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, born in 1746, worked on the plates of this series about 1810 to 1820, through the war with Bonaparte’s armies in Spain, the famine in Madrid of 1811 to 1812, and the reaction under Ferdinand VII that followed the peace. He did not issue them. They were first published in 1863, thirty-five years after his death in 1828, by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, with eighty plates; two further plates, 81 and 82, which belong with the last group, were joined to the series later. Goya’s working proofs survive, some with his manuscript titles, and the engraved captions of the first edition follow those titles. A set he gave to his friend Ceán Bermúdez carries a manuscript title page that names the fatal consequences of the bloody war in Spain with Bonaparte, and with them other emphatic caprices.
The unit scored is the series as one work: the eighty-two etchings now counted as Los Desastres de la Guerra, in the order now standard, as the image stands in the first edition and in Goya’s proofs. The plates are etched and worked with aquatint, with burnishing and lavis in places; they are small, of roughly one size, and horizontal, each with a short caption beneath the image, many of them of one to four words. The copper plates survive. The later editions printed from them, from the 1890s into the twentieth century, the preparatory drawings, and Goya’s other print series, the Caprichos, the Tauromaquia and the Disparates, are context and are not scored.
The first plate sets the key. A man kneels in darkness with his arms held out, and the caption beneath him reads “Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer”: sad presentiments of what is to come. Nothing in the plate says what will come. The eighty-one plates after it say it, one at a time, and the series is read as Goya ordered it, from that presentiment to the end. By the usual division, which is a convention of scholarship and is not engraved on the plates, the war runs from about plate 2 to 47, the famine from about 48 to 64, and the last group, the caprichos enfáticos, from about 65 to 82.
Movement II
The war group shows combat, reprisal, execution, rape, mutilation and flight. Its second plate already states what the series discloses, in its caption: “Con razon ó sin ella”, with reason or without. The early plates show the French as executioners and the Spanish as victims and avengers, and the series begins as a partisan’s account. It does not stay one. By the middle of the war group Spaniards commit atrocity too, and the captions refuse to tell the two apart. War is atrocity that does not care for its cause. That is a meaning, it can be stated, and it is the modern understanding of war, stated here in images before it was stated anywhere else so plainly.
The dead after the battle are not heroes. In plate 39, “Grande hazaña! Con muertos!”, dismembered men hang on a tree against an empty sky, the antique torso made carrion, and the caption names the deed great. In plate 37, “Esto es peor”, a torso is impaled on a splintered trunk. In plate 26, “No se puede mirar”, the victims face guns that enter from outside the frame; the riflemen are not shown. Plate 15 is captioned “Y no hai remedio”. The elevation the series reaches is of this one kind, dread, and it comes again and again. Plate 7, “Qué valor!”, with its named heroine, is the one moment near grandeur.
The inheritance was Callot’s Les Grandes Misères de la guerre of 1633, with its distant crowds, orderly hangings and moral verses, and behind it the battle and history painting in which war is victory, sacrifice and the commander’s glory. Goya keeps none of it. The viewer stands at arm’s length from the act; there is no commander and no victory, and no battle in the sense of a field; the victims are anonymous and so are the killers. The departure was paid for. Its satires of clergy and regime, and its refusal of the patriotic story, made the series dangerous under the restored monarchy, and it waited until 1863. The Third of May 1808, Goya’s painting of an execution on one night, stands on this desk at 9.0.
Movement III
The caption is half the form. Under plate 44 it reads “Yo lo vi”, I saw it: the witness’s oath. Under plate 45 comes “Y esto tambien”, and this too. Plate 3 answers plate 2 with “Lo mismo”, the same; plate 36 is “Tampoco”; plate 32 asks “Por qué?”; plate 18 is “Enterrar y callar”, bury them and say nothing. These are not morals. They are the mutters, rejoinders and refusals of someone who saw, spoken beneath the plate and never explaining, and they turn the repetition of the series into reply. In a book with illustrations the images would serve a text; here the words serve the image and fail it on purpose.
The print is the other half. It is held in the hand, at reading distance, one plate at a time, and it is multiplied, so that private witness becomes public. A painting or a cycle of paintings would lose that scale and that multiplicity, and would lose the argument by accumulation that is the series’ way of thinking. The aquatint, with its dirty grounds and absent backgrounds, is the void around atrocity; the etched line, fast and broken, is the speed of the witness. Untouched paper serves as light and as nothing, and one aquatint tone can be a sky or nothing at all. The form is the knowledge.
The making is uneven, and the series pays for it. Goya worked in wartime with poor materials. Some plates are weakly bitten or have failed aquatint grounds; several were burnished and reworked with mixed success; some of the late allegories are drawn with less command than the war plates, and Rembrandt’s etching is more even. The best plates are among the most commanding prints made: plate 39, three bodies, a tree and the blank sheet; the crowding and the dark of the famine plates; the cropping that puts the rifles and the firing squads outside the frame; the needle’s speed in the scenes of flight; the lavis and burnished half-tones of the last plates.
Movement IV
The famine group carries the war into the city, where no soldier is. Madrid starves in 1811 and 1812; mothers and children die together; the dead are carted and stacked, in “Al cementerio” (56). Charity fails: plate 55 is captioned “Lo peor es pedir”, the worst is to beg. Famine is war’s other face, and the group cannot be taken out of the series without breaking its argument, which needs a war that reaches past the field to bodies that never fought. Here the series holds most of the world it holds: the body, the family, the poor, the dated history of one city in one hunger.
The last group, the caprichos enfáticos, turns from witness to emblem. Its allegories and satires are aimed at the restoration under Ferdinand VII: a vulture plucked by peasants, animals and masks, Truth lying dead with a monk and a bishop at her grave. It changes register, and the joint shows; its animals and masks belong more to the Caprichos than to the war, and its allegory, tied to the politics of 1814 to 1820, is obscure without notes. One witness, one ironic voice, one tonal world and one subject, unreason with power over bodies, carried from the soldier to the cleric, still hold it to the rest. The law bends and does not break.
Not every plate is required. In the middle of the war group ten or a dozen plates of reprisal and flight do work that their neighbours already do, and a few of the animal satires of the last group are local and replaceable. The series is required in its shape, permitted in its count, and it resists subtraction less than a single canvas does. Saturn Devouring His Son, painted on a wall of Goya’s house, stands at 8.7 on this desk; The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, plate 43 of the Caprichos, at 8.6.
Movement V
The series ends in the peace. In plate 79, “Murió la Verdad”, Truth dies in the arms of the clergy. Plate 80 asks “Si resucitará?”, whether she will rise again. Plate 81 is “Fiero monstruo!”, and plate 82, “Esto es lo verdadero”, sets a peasant beside the radiant figure with his tools and the fruits of the earth. Read as Goya ordered it, the sequence is a passion carried by a nation: the presentiment in darkness, the bodies bound to stakes and trees in the poses of martyrdom, the burial of Truth and an uncertain resurrection. It is built as structure, not alluded to, and it is built mostly in the last plates, the weakest as images.
For half a century the series reached no one. After 1863 its reach became wide and particular. Otto Dix’s Der Krieg of 1924, fifty etchings with aquatint, takes its format, technique and stance from it, and stands on this desk at 8.6; Käthe Kollwitz made prints of war in its line; the Chapman brothers made Great Deeds Against the Dead in 1994, the sculpture of plate 39, and Insult to Injury in 2003, a reworked set of the prints themselves. The photography of war in the twentieth century has been set beside it again and again, and argued within the frame it made. Its questions are still open: whether “Yo lo vi” is literal, whether the series is patriotic, pacifist or neither, what Goya meant by keeping it back.
The copper plates survive. Later editions were printed from them as they wore, and the plates were steel-faced, so that much of what has been seen misrepresents the tonal range; the wear is a fact of survival and is not charged to the maker. The first edition and Goya’s proofs carry the image as made, all eighty-two of it, and the series has been present without break since 1863 in every major print room. In them the kneeling man of the first plate still holds out his arms in the dark, and the last plate still asks the question it was made to ask.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged plate by plate, and the series resists subtraction less than a single canvas does; that is its cost. Plate 1 cannot go: the kneeling man, arms out in darkness, is the presentiment the whole argues out. The chains of plates cannot go as wholes, because the series argues by accumulation and by the dry reply of one caption to the last: “Esto es peor” (37) after the mutilated body, “Yo lo vi” (44) as the witness’s oath. The famine group cannot go, nor plates 79 and 80. What yields is in the middle: ten or a dozen plates of reprisal and flight repeat their neighbours’ work, and a few animal satires of the last group are local and replaceable. Required in its shape, permitted in its count.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The case against: the early plates take a side, the French as executioners and the Spanish as victims and avengers; the last allegories are tied to the politics of 1814 to 1820 and obscure without notes; much of the series renders horror, which is a mood. The answer: what is disclosed can be stated and holds. War is atrocity that does not care for its cause. “Con razon ó sin ella” (2), with reason or without, says it at the outset, and by the middle of the war group the Spaniards butcher too. The dead are not heroes; famine is war’s other face; the peace betrays the war. Held below the top because the allegories carry this less clearly than the war plates.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The elevation is of one kind, terror and dread, and it recurs plate after plate, which is what earns the figure. The bodies on the tree against an empty sky in “Grande hazaña! Con muertos!” (39); the impaled torso in “Esto es peor” (37); the victims in “No se puede mirar” (26) before guns that enter from outside the frame; the famine dead carted and stacked in “Al cementerio” (56). The aquatint grounds make each scene a small theatre of the void. A second height is rarer: the light on Truth in the last plates, and “Qué valor!” (7), the one moment near grandeur. Held lower because the plates are small, monochrome and seen one at a time, and the series sets out to deny exaltation.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The case against: the series refuses myth; its heroes are absent, its gods are clerics and vultures, and its archetypes in the last group are emblem-book allegory, Truth, the monster and the vulture, evoked rather than built. The answer: the archetypal structure bears load at the scale of the whole. The sequence runs from a presentiment in darkness through a passion of a people, bodies bound to stakes and trees in the poses of martyrdom, to the burial of Truth, the question of her rising (80) and, in 82, the peasant beside the radiant figure with the fruits of the earth. Held at the gate because the building lies mostly in the last plates, the weakest as images.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance: Callot’s Les Grandes Misères de la guerre of 1633, with its distant crowds, orderly hangings and moral verses, and battle and history painting, in which war is victory and the commander’s glory. Goya turns from all of it. The viewer stands at arm’s length; there is no commander, no victory, no battle in the sense of a field; victims and killers alike are anonymous; the captions are not morals but a witness’s mutters, rejoinders and refusals. The stake was total: its satires of clergy and regime, and its refusal of the patriotic story, made the series unpublishable under the restored monarchy, and Goya never issued it. Held a tenth below the top because its means, etching and aquatint, were inherited and mastered rather than abolished.
Score: 9.3 / 10
As a painting or a cycle of paintings the work would lose its argument by accumulation, its private scale, the multiplicity that makes witness public, and the caption, which is half the form. The caption is the instrument: “Por qué?” (32), “Enterrar y callar” (18), “Yo lo vi” (44) are the voice of someone who saw, speaking under the plate and never explaining. In a book with illustrations the images would serve a text; here the text serves the image and fails it on purpose. The aquatint is the void around atrocity, the etched line the witness’s speed. The form is the knowledge. Held below the highest figure because the last group borrows the form of the Caprichos rather than extending its own.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence, not promise: since 1863 the series has borne continuous re-examination without exhausting. Its questions remain open. The order and meaning of the caprichos enfáticos; whether “Yo lo vi” is literal; whether the series is patriotic, pacifist or neither; how the captions qualify the images; what Goya meant by keeping it back. It is read anew in every war, and the photography of war in the twentieth century has been set beside it again and again. Formally the plates reward the closest looking: the use of the blank paper, the cropping of the executioners, the way one aquatint tone can be a sky or nothing. Held short of the summit of the axis because the plates that yield most are concentrated in the war group.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The series reorganised what an image of war could be, from triumph or lament to evidence without a side, and made the print series a vehicle of conscience. It reached no one for half a century and redirected nothing in its own decade; the delay is discounted, and holds the figure below works that moved their field at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Otto Dix’s Der Krieg of 1924, fifty etchings with aquatint, takes its format, technique and stance directly from it; Käthe Kollwitz’s prints of war; the Chapman brothers’ Great Deeds Against the Dead of 1994, the sculpture of plate 39, and Insult to Injury of 2003, a reworked set of the prints themselves; and the moral frame within which the war photography of the twentieth century was made and argued.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two centuries since the making and more than a century and a half since publication. Form: whole; all eighty-two images survive in the plates, in the first edition and in Goya’s proofs. Presence: continuous since 1863 and of the widest kind, in every major print room, in endless reproduction, and in a fixed place in the account of modern art and of war. Fabric: the copper plates survive, worn by later printings and steel-faced, so that later editions misrepresent the tonal range; the first edition and the proofs carry the image as made. The figure sits at the seam of two centuries, with a light charge for half a century without any public and for the worn later states.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The case against: the series is uneven as printmaking. Goya worked in wartime with poor materials; some plates are weakly bitten or have failed aquatint grounds; several were burnished and reworked with mixed success. Rembrandt’s etching, the summit of the medium, is more even. The answer: the best plates are among the most commanding prints made. The economy of plate 39, three bodies, a tree and the blank sheet; untouched paper as light and as nothing; the cropping that puts rifles and firing squads outside the frame; the speed of the needle in the scenes of flight. The making carries the meaning. The unevenness holds it below the anchors of painting.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the reportorial war plates, a woman stabbing a soldier, a village execution, and the allegories of the end, a vulture plucked by peasants, Truth dead with a monk and a bishop at her grave. They mostly obey one law. One witness, one ironic voice in the captions, one tonal world of etched line on aquatint, and one subject, unreason with power over bodies, carried from the soldier to the cleric. Goya’s manuscript title joins the two kinds, and the turn from war to famine to restoration is one argument. But the law bends. The last group changes register from witness to emblem, its animals and masks belong to the Caprichos more than to the war, and the joint shows. Wide range, held, with a seam.
Score: 8.8 / 10
For a print series the holding is wide. The body, in torture, rape, mutilation and starvation; the family, in mothers with children in flight and the famine’s dying together; labour and the peasantry, in the peasants who fight and the peasant of the last plate with his tools and harvest; the state, as the occupying army and then the restored monarchy; the church, in priests killed in the war and clergy burying Truth in the peace; history, in a dated war, a dated famine and a dated reaction; the sacred and the natural order, in Truth’s light, the dead tree and the offered earth. One argument integrates them. What holds the axis here is that no figure has an inner life beyond the moment of terror.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.3, then The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.2, with The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.1. A departure from the whole tradition of war imagery whose stake was its maker’s public in his lifetime; a form in which the print held in the hand and the caption beneath it are the knowledge; a reach, late and then wide, from Dix to the photography of war; an image whole after two centuries in the first edition and the proofs; questions still open; and plates among the most commanding prints made.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 8.4: eighty-two plates resist subtraction less than one canvas, and ten or a dozen in the war group repeat their neighbours; and the world held, wide as it is, has no inner life in it beyond the moment of terror. Beside them The Archetypal Deep at 8.5, at the gate exactly, because the passion of a people is built mostly in the last plates, the weakest as images; and The Sublime and The Inner Law at 8.8, dread in one kind at a small size, and a seam where witness turns to emblem.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Unconcealment at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.5 meets it exactly. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 107.0, an average of 8.92 that displays 8.9, a tenth short of the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the series as a sequence, of most of its plates by number and caption, of its three groups by the usual division and of its printing history in outline; from impressions and reproductions known, not from a census of impressions, and no impression or written source was consulted for this page. The work scored is Los Desastres de la Guerra as one work: the eighty-two etchings with aquatint, made about 1810 to 1820, first published in 1863 by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, with eighty plates, and with plates 81 and 82 joined later, judged in the order now standard as the image stands in the first edition and in Goya’s proofs. The copper plates survive; the later editions printed from them, worn and steel-faced, count as facts of survival and are not charged to the maker. The preparatory drawings, the Caprichos, the Tauromaquia, the Disparates and the paintings of the war are context and are not scored. The only words quoted are the captions of the plates, in the reading’s spelling, whose accentuation follows the engraved spelling only approximately; the manuscript title page of Ceán Bermúdez’s set is paraphrased. The division of the plates into three groups is the scholarly convention, not engraved, and its boundaries are approximate. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the dimensions of the plates, the exact mix of techniques plate by plate, where the copper plates and the drawings are now kept, how far the first edition’s captions were edited, and the place of the series in particular later works and writings beyond those named.