Nature morte : l'étal du boucher

Goya painted this while Spain was at war with Napoleon's armies, in the same years he was privately etching the Disasters of War. It belongs to a group of about a dozen small still lifes of dead and butchered animals. Here a severed sheep's head and a slab of ribs lie on a bare counter, the head turned so one eye stares out. Still life usually meant abundance, a table laid with fruit and game. Goya's are stripped down to meat, painted in a Madrid where fighting, disease and the famine of 1811 killed people in the tens of thousands. The ribs get the same steady attention he gave to living flesh in his portraits.