Cannibali che fanno a pezzi le vittime

Goya painted this small dark panel around 1800, one of a pair on the theme of cannibalism. Scholars think the scenes may recall a story Goya could well have known, the deaths of two Jesuit missionaries, Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, killed by an Iroquois group in Canada in 1649 during a period of frontier war. Whatever the source, the picture is stripped of any moralising frame. Nude figures crowd together in a cave-like gloom over the remains of the dead, and Goya draws the eye to them with a few quick strokes of red. It is a cabinet-sized work, not a public commission, made in the same years he was privately filling albums with images of violence and cruelty.