Toter Truthahn

Goya painted this somewhere between 1808 and 1812, the years Napoleon's armies were in Spain and the country was tearing itself apart. In the same stretch he was making the Disasters of War, those unbearable etchings of what he had seen. This is only a dead bird on a table, a turkey laid out limp with its head hanging down. But he painted it the way he was painting the war, in thick, blunt strokes, with a palette cut back to little more than ochre, white, black and one stroke of red at the head. The animal is treated less like game bound for the kitchen than like a body. It hangs beside a companion picture of dead fowl in the Prado, the two of them quiet witnesses to how living matter stops.