3-101-514 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London"/Heritage Images

Grande hazaña! Con muertos!, (An heroic feat! With dead men!/Great deeds! With dead bodies!), Plate 39 from "Los Desastres de la Guerra", c1810, (published 1863). Three corpses have been tied to a tree: torso suspended upside down, the head impaled on a branch; another is tied with a rope at the waist, arms behind his back. The practice of mutilating corpses to strip them of any dignity, a common method that was applied particularly in the case of traitors. Although Goya did not make known his intention when creating the plates (between 1810 and 1815), art historians see them as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent cruel war that ended in Spanish victory in the Peninsular War of 1808-1814, and the setbacks to the liberal cause following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814. The prints were not published until 35 years after Goya's death, probably because only then was it considered politically safe to produce a series of artworks criticising both the French and the restored Bourbons. From "Los Desastres de la Guerra: colección de ochenta láminas inventadas y grabadas al agua fuerte por Don Francisco de Goya", (The Disasters of War: collection of eighty plates made and etched by Don Francisco de Goya), [Madrid, 1863].