3-100-741 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London"/Heritage Images

Tambien estos, (These too), Plate 25, "Los Desastres de la Guerra", c1810, (published 1863). Injured fighters being called to serve again. Patients in an improvised hospital - when not dead or prostrate - rejoin the fight. In the foreground, one man is finishing dressing; another is being lifted from his pallet by several others. Some lie motionless on their cots or on the ground. There is a suggestion of the rumpled folds of field-hospital bedding - of used sheets - stretched horizontally across the darkness of the room (or perhaps cave) that serves as this field shelter. 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].