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What about The Third of May – one of the best paintings of his
http://eeweems.com/goya/3rd_of_may.html
Carlton: Thanks for the link to that great picture. The comments attached to it showed some mistakes, I thought. If Goya’s gardener said that they watched the shootings of 1808 from his house (la Quinta del Sordo) he was wrong because Goya didn’t buy it until 1819.
I hope the expert on the Napoleonic Wars didn’t mean to balance the wrongs in that war by claiming that the Spanish peasants “frequently” dug up dead French soldiers and mutilated their bodies. Remember, the Spanish people fought desperately, heroically, against a skilled foreign army that came to subjugate their country. Their brave and stubborn resistance was what impressed Goya and what he immortalized in his big painting. Those soldiers in the firing squad were French but it wasn’t their Frenchness that Goya meant to show.
And the friar in the group waiting to be shot was a hero like the rest of them. He was no representative of the Inquisition being “legitimately” punished, as the man from Bangladesh supposed. A big part of the Spanish population were clergy of some kind, there were good and bad, some more, some less religious. In his Disasters of War etchings Goya shows friars taking part in the uprising. They naturally felt just as outraged as the rest.