A Favorite Painting 8

Francisco de Goya, The Executions of the Third of May 1808, 1814

This is the kind of painting that a historian is sure to appreciate, symbolizing, in its dramatic depiction of violent retribution, the period often referred to as the Revolutionary Era. The scene took place in Spain when citizens in Puerto del Sol offered some meager resistance to the forces of Napoleon then establishing occupation of the country. In the aftermath, Egyptian troops under French command were ordered to massacre any locals they could find, participation in the resistance apparently not necessarily a consideration. The brutality shocked Spaniards, like Goya, who had thought the French revolution offered a chance of democratic reform as it spread into Spain. The massacre quickly disavowed them of any such notion. The painting is stark in its violence, and although painted several years after the event, conveys the immediacy of the horror, in part through its almost sketch-like quality-- Goya didn't need to strive for hyper realism in style, because the emotional impact required little detail to embellish its power. One of the outcomes of that revolutionary generation was a more broadly commitment to realism in the arts, but it also planted the seeds for a modernism that, stylistically speaking, began to reckon the realism of emotion over that of draftsmanship. I think you can see Goya's work as an early expression of that.