Caníbales contemplando restos humanos

Goya painted this small panel around 1800, one of a pair meant to be held close and looked at in private rather than hung in a hall. The subject seems to reach back to 1649 and a story Europe still told: two French Jesuit missionaries, Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lallemant, captured and killed during the wars between Iroquois and Huron in what is now Canada. Goya shows the aftermath as a group of naked figures calmly considering the dismembered bodies, one of them holding up a severed head and an arm. He gives it none of the horror of a church altarpiece, only a flat, matter-of-fact cruelty. Its companion, showing the victims being prepared, hangs beside it today in Besancon.