The Third of May 1808

Goya painted this in 1814, but the night it shows had happened six years earlier. Napoleon's armies had occupied Madrid, and after the city rose against them on the second of May, the French answered the next day with mass executions of ordinary Spaniards. Goya lived through the occupation, and once a Spanish king was back on the throne he asked to record the resistance. There is no glory in how he did it. A firing squad stands on the right, faceless, their backs to us, rifles level, a machine. On the left the victims wait their turn, and one man in a white shirt throws his arms wide in the lantern light. Look at his right hand and you can see a dark mark on the palm, an echo of the wounds of Christ on the cross, turning a nameless labourer into something like a martyr. Behind him lie the ones already shot, and a line of others stretches back into the dark, still to come. Goya gives the killers no expression and the dying man all the feeling. The lantern on the ground is the only real light, and it falls on the condemned, not on the guns.