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" 'The horror!' .... this was the expression
of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had
a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling
face of a glimpsed truth ...." "Here in Goya is the beginning of our modern
anarchy." Goya titled a proof copy of this edition of prints "The Fatal Consequences of the Bloody War in Spain against Bonaparte and other Emphatic 'Caprichos'". He never published these images in his lifetime as he undoubtedly feared a political response from the despotic Spanish regime of Ferdinand VII that would endanger him, as had occurred in 1799 with the publication of his first set of prints, "Los Caprichos". "The Fatal Consequences." were published for the first time in 1863, thirty-five years after Goya's death. By virtue of the marriage of a Spanish noblewoman to the French Emperor, Spain and France had become allies so "The Disasters of War" was considered to be a politically more appropriate title. In losing reference to its provincial origins it acquires an evocation of the universal terror of war. The Holocaust, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, East Timor, New York, Bali.... our senses are inundated with appalling images of war and violence delivered daily in newspapers and on television. Culturally translated, these images become innocuously cartoon-like and sentimentally mythologised in film and video. This is how we assimilate the intolerable. Maybe today Goya would have been a photographer or documentary film-maker recording some catastrophe of war. The results would be unsettling, but would lack the visceral alchemy and poetry of the mark making process. Stone-deaf since 1792 as a consequence of illness, Goya heard and saw with his eyes, incisively drawing into the copperplate with dry-point and acid as he bears witness to the atrocities of Napoleon's troops. He compels us to look to the point of fascination and elevates into the light that which we would rather turn away from: the abyss at the edge of the human imagination. The probity of Goya's vision remains undeniable. The prescient imagery of Sad forebodings of what is going to happen (Plate 1) has a man flinging out his arms as he falls to his knees in front of a wall of black rock. Looking to the sky, is he seeking from God, the Dead or History a reason as to why there exists so much incomprehensible human cruelty dealt upon its own kind? Gaunt and aghast, is this figure the crestfallen eyewitness of unspeakable horror caught in a moment of supplication just before the firing squad cuts him down? The caption for Plate 44, I saw it, speaks of the immediacy of Goya's experience. The brutal turmoil and the gore that litters its wake sicken us as they do the retching man in This is what you were born for (Plate12); despair threatens to overwhelm us as it does the figure in There is no one to help them (Plate 60). In Nor this time (Plate 36) and Perhaps they are of another breed (Plate 61), the victors and those lucky enough to have been spared such cruel fates reassure themselves and cause us to question our own responses to contemporary events, as does the vicious contagion of mob mentality depicted in Rabble (Plate 28) and He deserved it (Plate 29). And yet we find evidence of redemption. In A woman's charity (Plate 49) and The worst is to beg (Plate 55) we find compassion as a young woman and an old woman bring food to the starving; a man carries an old woman away from danger in They escape through the flames (Plate 41); refugee women carry their children to safety in And this too (Plate 45). Atrocities sear the body and spirit but the seeds of generosity and dignity survive to salvage the future. Goya's representations of these heinous acts and crimes against humanity remain as relevant today as at the time of their creation. Using his powers of observation and vigorous composition in tandem with an inventive and masterful use of the etching medium, Goya achieves extraordinary empathy with the human condition. Nicholas Harding 2002
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