The Disasters of War - Interpretation

Interpretation

In The Disasters of War, Goya does not excuse any purpose to the random slaughter—the plates are devoid of the consolation of divine order or the dispensation of human justice. This in part a result of the absence of melodrama or consciously artful presentation that would distance the viewer from the brutality of the subjects, as found in Baroque martyrdom. In addition, Goya refuses to offer the stability of traditional narrative. Instead, his composition tends to highlight the most disturbing aspects of each work.

The plates are set spaces without fixed boundaries; the mayhem extends outside the frames of the picture plane in all directions. Thus, they express the randomness of violence, and in their immediacy and brutality they have been described as analogous to 19th- and 20th-century photojournalism. According to Robert Hughes, as with Goya's earlier Caprichos series, The Disasters of War is likely to have been intended as a "social speech"; satires on the then prevailing "hysteria, evil, cruelty and irrationality the absence of wisdom" of Spain under Napoleon, and later the Inquisition. It is evident Goya viewed the Spanish war with disillusionment, and despaired both for the violence around him and for the loss of a liberal ideal he believed was being replaced by a new militant unreason. Hughes believed Goya's decision to render the images through etchings, which by definition are absent of colour, indicates feelings of utter hopelessness.

His message late in life is contrary to the humanistic view of man as essentially good but easily corrupted. He seems to be saying that violence is innate in man, "forged in the substance of what, since Freud, we have called the id." Hughes believed that in the end there is only the violated emptiness of acceptance of our fallen nature: like the painting of Goya's dog, "whose master is as absent from him as God is from Goya."

The Disasters of War plates are preoccupied with wasted bodies, undifferentiated body parts, castration and female abjection. There are dark erotic undertones to a number of the works. Connell notes the innate sexuality of the image in plate 7—Agustina de Aragón's igniting a long cannon. The art historian Lennard Davis suggests that Goya was fascinated with the "erotics of dismemberment", while Hughes mentions plate 10 in Los disparates, which shows a woman carried in the grip of a horse's mouth. To Hughes, the woman's euphoria suggests, among other possible meanings, orgasm.