The events of May 2 didn’t all happen in one spot or at one time of the day. Once ignited, the insurrection flared and waned across the city from west to east. There was a particularly sharp struggle, and (one might have thought) a good emblematic one for the purposes of a history painter, that morning in the artillery park at Monteleón when, after the Spanish soldiers had been confined to barracks on Murat’s orders, to prevent their giving aid to the rebels, two patriot officers among them, Velarde and Daoiz by name, gave arms to the insurgents and were killed for it. Later, in the rituals of patriotism that surrounded the return of El Deseado and the Spanish monarchy in 1814, the decayed remains of these two brave men were dug from the common grave they shared with the other victims of the massacre, and paraded across Madrid in a magnificently ornamented hearse. Velarde and Daoiz would seem to have been the only Spanish patriots killed on May 2 whose names became publicly exalted, and who might thus have been candidates for some kind of personal commemoration by Goya. The dying heroes cut down in their prime? Jacques-Louis David would have liked that, not that Goya particularly cared about David. He would have seen a print made of their death, one of four scenes of the events of May 2–3 done around 1813 by a lesser artist, López Enguidanos. But for the purposes of these works, Goya couldn’t have cared less about men with names, brave as Velarde and Daoiz were. He wanted to commemorate the plebs, the pueblo. In words John Masefield used in “A Consecration” a century later, referring to the Boer War:
Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne,
Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown,
But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.
Goya also wanted something visually spectacular: a clash between two clearly identified sides. One incident among several stood out: the fight in the Puerta del Sol. It presented Goya with an irresistible contrast. On one side, the civilians in their street clothes and working garb. (Later, lists—now preserved in the Municipal Archive of Madrid—with the names and occupations of the dead, the wounded, and the missing would be compiled. They included shoemakers, glassblowers, muleteers, gardeners, bakers, locksmiths, coachmen, a couple of students, and even a priest or two, but no “quality” people.) On the other side, the Mamelukes in their turbans and loose red pants and the French cuirassiers of the guard with their glittering brass helmets. And the Mamelukes—a point that must have struck Goya as ready-made for propaganda—were moros, Cairenes, north Africans. Their presence in his picture would, to Spanish eyes, seem not only exotic but of unique and especially disagreeable foreignness. When was the last time Spain had been occupied by hostile Arab troops? Why, back in the fifteenth century, before Fernando and Isabel began the “reconquest” of Spain and threw the devils out. So by painting the struggle between true-blue Spaniards and bloodthirsty foreign Moors, Goya was encouraging his viewers to revive their old anti-Arabism—to see the fight as a death struggle between two cultures, and the enraged shopkeepers, grooms, and carpenters of the Puerta del Sol as the true heirs to the nationalist glory of El Cid.
As it happens, it is only from the Mamelukes’ costumes that we know the scene is the Puerta del Sol, since the records all say that a fight with Mamelukes happened in that square and nowhere else in Madrid. No building in the rather vague background Goya gives can be securely identified with the architecture of the square, either as it is now or from what little we know of its appearance in 1808. In any case, the architecture hardly counts, as usual in Goya’s work. Almost the whole of the Second of May (more formally known as The Charge of the Mamelukes) is taken up with a thick mass of struggling, grappling figures, which create an impression of sluggish movement across the canvas from left to right. It is a curiously static, even congested layout, except at its center, which is filled by the smooth, white, unblemished sphere of a giant horse’s ass. The violence, of which there is a lot, revolves (as it were) around this ironically serene globe. The confused look of the composition is not, one may think, due to any lack of skill on Goya’s part, although some have found it less than esthetically satisfying. It mirrors the chaos of real battle in a real place, “the fog of war,” with men crouching and charging, hacking at one another, and horses stumbling on prostrate bodies. It is, in short, deliberate. It is about as far from the ideal order reflected in Renaissance battle pieces—Paolo Uccello’s Rout of San Romano, to take an extreme example—as painting can be.
But the Second of May contains details and elements that stick indelibly in one’s mind because they are so vivid and so unlike anything in earlier painted battle pieces. The young man in the pale-green jacket on the right, for instance. His posture conveys that he has crept up on the white horse in the foreground and is gripping the rein its Mameluke rider has dropped. He is stabbing it above the right front leg, trying, perhaps, to find the heart or a lung. But he can’t quite bring himself to put his weight behind the thrust. He is clearly scared—his face, with the bulging, white-rimmed eye, conveys that—and he is poking tentatively at the poor horse’s flesh, afraid to stab, afraid not to stab. Then there are the two men in the middle of the picture: the citizen stabbing at the mameluco while dragging him backward over the rump of that terrified horse. Goya would go on—from the Desastres de la guerra to the Black Paintings’ vision of the two peasants, thigh-deep in quicksand, belting each other with their cudgels even as they sink to mutual death—to produce terrible images of human violence, but this is one of the worst and probably the first in which his genius for showing men in the grip of terminal aggression is allowed full rein in painted, rather than etched, form. The citizen—who is dressed in black, in the traje corto, or short jacket, of a majo, that class of proletarian dandy Goya admired and identified with—bares his teeth: not in a smile, but in an uncontrolled rictus of fury, as he stabs and stabs at the chest of his enemy. You know he couldn’t hear you if you screamed in his ear. His eye is shining like his front teeth, a crazy’s eye. His target, the nearly unhorsed Mameluke, is dragged back and down in a quarter-circle, his baggy red pants forming the brightest patch of color in the painting. His feet have come out of the stirrups and are arrested in midair, a comic-strip shorthand for quick movement that Goya liked and associated with violent death. (It does not appear in earlier art; you would never see it in a battle piece by Mantegna or Rubens. But Goya used it in a number of images, such as the body arrested in midfall as it is heaved into the mass grave in Charity, plate 27 of the Disasters of War. It is a freeze-frame, a snapshot before the camera was invented.) The Mameluke has been stretched backward for a while; we know that because the blood from the many stab wounds in his diaphragm and gut has run down his chest and down his hanging arms toward his hands. His mouth gapes in death. One of his turbaned comrades has bulled up on horseback (his hand, holding a dagger, is the apex of the composition) to stab the Spaniard who keeps knifing him, but he won’t make it; a black-clad man in the right foreground, with his back to us, is aiming a gun at him, and an insurgent has grabbed him from behind, at the waist, and is yanking him off his saddle. The glaring face of this second Mameluke could almost belong to the majo with the knife. This, too, is part of Goya’s point: how fury and fear dissolve identity by stripping the human animal to its most primitive essences, a process, one might say, of which Goya was the supreme tragic poet. The decorum associated with earlier depictions of men at war has faltered. It shows gaps. It has almost gone. Hence, the incipient modernity of the painting. It may want to compete with the Rubenses Goya knew from the royal collections, but history has run past it, and it is too late even for someone as excessively gifted as Goya to be a Spanish Rubens—to do so, he would have had to look too far back, to a lost age when you could still speak of “glory” in war.
Goya, El Dos de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid (The Second of May, 1808), 1808–14. Oil on canvas, 266 × 345 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.37)
If the Second of May is a congested, almost confused secular documentary, the Third o
f May has more of the character of a religious altarpiece—dedicated, however, to the religion of patriotism. That is to say, it uses devices from religious iconography to wring responses of pity and terror from those who look at it, and its success in doing this is so complete that it has lived on for almost two centuries as the undiminished and unrivaled archetype of images of suffering and brutality in war. A list of those who have imitated it (or been “inspired” by it) would be quite long and would contain several famous names. Édouard Manet based his Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (1867) on it. It provided a partial source for Picasso’s Guernica (1937), in which the lightbulb—emblem of the pitiless glare of twentieth-century awareness—substitutes for the fierce cubical lantern shedding light on Goya’s execution scene. It was also the source for one of the least successful of all Picassos, the Massacre in Korea, a fatuous effort done to keep his French Stalinist friends happy, in which a group of very un-Asian-looking Korean women are menaced by a firing squad made up of robotic Yankee imperialists pointing weapons derived from the ray guns of 1950s science fiction, while their officer, in what appears to be a welding mask, brandishes a sword. (Picasso must have figured that GIs would have the very latest hardware.) Except for the Manet, later homages to and pastiches of the Third of May fall miserably short of it, and its sheer intensity defeats comparison with earlier paintings. The prosperously muscled giants in the battle pieces of Rubens are undergoing nothing, compared with those proles of Goya’s facing (or unable to face) the French muskets. No Attic vase painting of Homeric battle, no Renaissance image of perfectly proportioned bodies slugging it out, no frieze of warriors encased in their cuirasses esthétiques in the manner of Poussin so impresses you with its raw truth. Of course, this is because the truth offered by previous paintings of war is not raw but manifestly cooked; while Goya’s extraordinary image is not raw either, but cooked in a different and startlingly unprecedented way, so that it looks raw. This feigning of rawness is not the least modern thing about the Third of May.
The key figure in the painting may be the same man as the key one in the Second of May, the citizen stabbing the Mameluke. Or is he only similar, with his mustache, sideburns, and swarthy complexion? Impossible to say. Certainly his clothes are different—and would he have had time to change between the slaughter in Puerta del Sol and his arrest by the French? He kneels before the firing squad, but not in a posture of submission. It is more like devotion. Why should he be kneeling at all, in a posture associated with submission, when Goya’s image is about defiance in the very jaws of death? Probably because one likely source for Goya’s composition was a devotional print by an unknown artist depicting the execution at Murviedro of five Valencian monks by Napoleon’s soldiers in 1812. In it, the monks are kneeling, as though praying to God. Two other points of similarity between this banal image and Goya’s are that there is a dead monk in the foreground of the print, corresponding to the sprawled corpse of the patriot on the lower left of the Third of May; and that, whereas four of the monks are wearing black-and-white habits, one is dressed in white, like Goya’s man in the white shirt, and is holding out his arms in a similar gesture of crucifixion, while the monk to the left of him wrings his hands in the same gesture of despair and supplication as the man to the left of Goya’s victim.
Whatever its sources, Goya’s stocky little martyr-of-the-people is one of the most vivid human “presences” in all art. In an age of unremitting war and cruelty, when the value of human life seems to be at the deepest discount in human history, when our culture is saturated with endless images of torment, brutality, and death, he continues to haunt us. He is a two-hundred-year-old equivalent of those few photo images that leaked out of Vietnam into long, emblematic life: the screaming naked girl running away from a napalm strike, toward the camera, the chinless police chief blowing out the brains of a plaid-shirted suspect at point-blank range with his kicking .38 on a Saigon street. Goya’s man’s yellow pants and blazing white shirt are the highest tones in the painting, harshly lit by the lantern the soldiers have put on the ground so that they can see their killing. (Perhaps too harshly; this oil lamp, which presumably it must have been, throws light like acetylene lamps, which had not yet been invented. Its radiance is part of Goya’s poetic license.) His eye, the big black cornea ringed in white, bulges with terror. He throws his arms up and out as though throwing his whole life, in extremis, in the face of his murderers.
This is the posture of a crucified man, linking the figure of the anonymous political martyr to that of Christ. To make sure we get the point of the comparison, Goya has referred to the marks of the stigmata, the nail wounds in Christ’s hands, which in moments of religious ecstasy were imprinted on the flesh of certain Catholic saints: there is a distinct (though bloodless) scar on the man’s right hand, though none can be seen on his left. Too literal a transference of the stigmata could have pushed the image into corniness. And one must realize that there is nothing passive about this pseudo-Christ. Some Christs in earlier paintings than Goya’s are led passively, dumbly, to Golgotha like calves to the shambles, submitting to their captors’ will because the Roman authorities are enacting God’s design for the sacrifice of His Son. Goya’s does not submit, even at gunpoint. And there is no higher design: only tyranny replicating itself in the night.
Goya, El Tres de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid o Los fusilamientos en la montaña del Príncipe Pío (The Third of May, 1808, or The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill), 1814. Oil on canvas, 266 × 345 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado. (illustration credit 8.38)
Next to this macho Christ of the pueblo, a priest kneels, clenching his hands in despair. At least, one guesses he is a priest: he is tonsured, the top of his head shaven. He reminds us that there were indeed patriotic priests among the insurgents who fought the French and were slaughtered for it by the Spaniards—a theme that is taken up in several images from the Disasters of War.
The other men in the group show various degrees of rage, defiance, and fear. One covers his eyes with his hands: he cannot look. Neither can the man in majo clothes with a red sash, who is being shoved toward the killing mound at the head of the queue by the pressure of the doomed throng behind him. (He is the other possible repeat of the Mameluke stabber in the Second of May.) His head buried in his clawing hands is a terrible image of abandonment and hopelessness, fit to be compared with the Damned Soul in Michelangelo’s Sistine Last Judgment, but the more powerful for being so laconic. One sees once again how readily Goya, lover of the stage that he was, could employ the melodramatic gestures for despair and anger that went with the popular theater of his day—and give these conventions a full human truth.
Then there are the dead men on the ground, especially the one who lies facedown in the foreground, his arms outspread and palms downward—repeating, in death, the last pose of the white-shirted victim in life, and matching the similar pose of a uniformed French soldier lying on the ground on the lower left side of the Second of May. The bloody earth he lies on is an occasion for one of Goya’s most inspired passages of realism. The blood is pigment, of course. It has dried to a scratched, dirty russet crust, soaked into the canvas like real blood soaking into the dry clay of the hill of Príncipe Pío. The pigment lacks the artifice of painted blood; it looks like a photo of the blood in a police report, a Polaroid taken at the scene of the crime, the once-liquid stuff smeared and scribbled by the twitchy movements of a dying body.
Most of the victims have faces. Their killers do not. This is one of the most often-noted aspects of the Third of May, and rightly so: with this painting, the modern image of war as anonymous killing is born, and a long tradition of killing as ennobled spectacle comes to its overdue end. The killers are, of course, the French firing squad, in the uniform of the Imperial Guard. Goya shows us their greatcoated backs, their legs, their cylindrical shakos (eight of them), their haversacks—but not their faces. The paint surface in which their mass is rendered is certainly not inert—Goya’s paint was hardly cap
able of inertia—but it has a threatening flatness and dullness compared with the vitality of the pigment that describes the Spanish victims. The one exception to this is the sheathed saber worn by the guardsman nearest to our eye. It almost seems more alive than its bearer: a marvelous piece of paintwork, a broad swipe of yellowy orange that defines the curve of the sheath. Where else, outside of English masters (Constable, Turner), could one find such inspired spontaneity in European painting in 1814?
The French lean forward, intent on their work, leveling their muskets, bayonets mounted, at their targets. The mass of backs bristles with metallic spikes of death; it is braced against the collective recoil of those big, slow-moving, .70-caliber lead balls. This motif—vulnerable human targets transformed by terror or defiance, facing a death thrust at them by clusters of sharp metal in the hands of anonymous squads in uniform—was a new one in painting, an invention of the late eighteenth century.19 But Goya had explored it before he set to work on the Third of May. Four etchings in the Disasters employ it. Three of these bear a specific relationship to the Third of May and must have served Goya as sources and notes for his enormous composition. Plate 2, Con razón o sin ella (“With reason or without it”), shows two civilian fighters launching themselves at a huddled knot of French soldiers, whose faces we do not see. Both Spaniards are meanly dressed, without uniforms; the face of one is pouring blood while he attacks with a mere knife against three bayoneted rifles. His companion grips a pike. They are hopelessly outarmed, but they fight on in a spirit of desperation, the same exaltado spirit that will suffuse the Third of May’s man in the white shirt. The French guardsman closest to us, with his sabre, belt, and lumpish forward-leaning silhouette, is virtually a duplicate of the nearest guardsman in the Third of May.
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