The Second of May 1808

On the second of May 1808 the people of Madrid rose against the French troops who had come to install Napoleon's brother on the Spanish throne. Goya set the fighting in a real street near the Puerta del Sol, and put the shock of it into a detail: the civilians are hacking not at ordinary French infantry but at the Mamelukes, the Egyptian cavalry Napoleon had folded into his army. For Spaniards, only recently freed from centuries of Moorish rule, being cut down by what looked like the old enemy carried a special sting. Goya painted this six years later, in 1814, once the French were gone, as a companion to the execution scene of the following morning. There is no hero at the centre and no clear line of victory, just a knot of horses and knives with a bleeding man thrown across the foreground.