3-101-545 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London"/Heritage Images

Caridad, (Charity), Plate 27, "Los Desastres de la Guerra", c1810, (published 1863). Burying the dead is one of the Works of Mercy that Goya studied as a child in his school catechism. The makeshift gravediggers, having stripped their enemies of their belongings, hurl them violently, without the slightest ceremony and as if they were mere refuse, into the black chasm in the foreground. Thus, those two naked bodies begin a paradoxical and wretched descent into the pit of their improvised grave. Other stripped bodies lie motionless, awaiting the same ignominious fate. They are likely enemy dead whose demise must be concealed. 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. 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].