Francisco Goya’s graphic art still offers significant insight into the artist’s complex personality, torn between the ambition to play a part in the highest spheres of society at the time, which he fulfilled by becoming painter to the court of Charles III of Spain, and deep belief in the ideals of the Enlightenment and in an early form of Europeanism that won ever-increasing support in the intellectual circles he frequented. In addition to this dichotomy, we have the partial indecipherability of many of his works, which often present areas of shadow and ambiguity, giving rise to a profusion of different interpretations despite being explicit in iconographic and thematic terms. The unfathomable workings of his mind provided the basis both for the idea that his engravings, sometimes seen as the expression of tormented genius, present an accumulation of his innermost thoughts, and also for the notion of Goya as a forerunner of Romanticism and the contemporary artist, due to his reflection on questions regarding the autonomy of art and the pursuit of freedom in the dynamics between the public and private spheres.¹ It is thus possible to distinguish in his works a challenge to the values of the society of the time - in the form of a critique of the widespread conservatism and conformism imposed by the Inquisition and the exercise of monarchical power - and disillusionment over the betrayal of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the events bound up with the Peninsular War of 1808-14. While an enigmatic and sometimes contradictory foundation clearly emerges also from the officially commissioned works, it is above all in the graphic art and series of paintings such as the Pinturas negras (Black Paintings) that his pursuit of freedom of expression and determination to protest against the injustices of his day by revealing them fully manifests itself. 

Goya’s experience of engraving began during his apprenticeship in the workshop of the painter José Luzán y Martínez in Zaragoza, which was characterised by the study of drawing and copying from prints, followed by a trip to Italy between 1769 and 1771. It is in this period that he is believed to have seen the prints of Giambattista Piranesi and the copies of works by great masters such as Raphael and Titian. Echoes of this journey are to be found in the engraving of the flight into Egypt (La huida a Egipto),² presumably produced on his return to Spain but certainly on the basis of the drawings in his famous Cuaderno italiano (Italian sketchbook). He moved to Madrid the following year and produced engravings of paintings by Diego Velázquez, an artist he greatly admired, from 1778 while working at the Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara.³ 

 The Peninsular War provides the historical setting for the Desastres de la Guerra, a series conceived and produced in a period of turmoil that saw the abdication of Charles IV in favour of his son Ferdinand VII, the latter’s deposition in favour of Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, his overthrow and the return of Ferdinando “the Desired” in 1813, popular uprisings and internecine conflict between supporters and opponents of the French “invaders”. Originally consisting of eighty-two prints divided into three groups, the series was produced in two copies by Goya, who gave one complete with all the phases of the proofs to his friend Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, an enlightened intellectual, collector and art critic.⁴ The first plates were engraved in 1810, according to autograph indications, but the dating of the series as a whole still proves uncertain. It is thought to have been completed by 1815,⁵ when the repressive reign of Ferdinand VII had already been restored. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Goya, recalling the pressures exerted upon him over the publication of the Caprichos, decided not to publish the work. The preparatory drawings and matrices were therefore left, together with the further eighteen of the Disparates (The Follies) series,⁶ in the hands of Goya’s son Javier when the artist moved to Bordeaux in 1824 with his mistress Leocadia Zorrilla.⁷ The unpublished group was therefore left in his house, the famous Quinta del Sordo, where the artist had created the enigmatic works referred to by critics as the Pinturas negras. 

The work was first published posthumously in 1863 by Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid after purchasing the plates of the Desastres de la Guerra and the Disparates from the collector Jaime Machén Casalins. This edition, in a run of 500 copies, presents a number of differences with respect to the autograph copy given to Bermudéz (London, British Museum), such as the transposition onto the plates of the explanatory captions beneath the images. The Cerruti copy belongs to this edition and also bears the French translation of each title, presumably added in accordance with the wishes of the previous owner Louis de Launay. In addition to the correction of punctuation and misprints,⁸ particular importance attaches to the minimal wiping of ink from the plates during printing so as to obtain a highly atmospheric image in accordance with the fashion of the mid-19th century. Another major difference of this particular edition is the fact of presenting eighty prints rather than the original eighty-two, as nos. 81 and 82 were not yet known at the time of the first printing.⁹ This phases also saw a change in the title, originally indicated by Goya as Fatales consecuencias de la sangrienta Guerra en España con Buonaparte y otros caprichos enfáticos, en 85 estampas. Inventadas, dibuxadas y grabadas, por el pintor original D. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. En Madrid (Fatal consequencies of the bloody war with Bonaparte and other emphatic caprices, in 85 plates. Invented, drawn, and etched by the artist Don Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. In Madrid). It was in 1863 that this became Desastres de la Guerra, using the name of the first of the three component groups of prints for the entire series. The discovery of the original title also made it possible to identify the origin of the process of production in the drawings in red chalk made in 1808 in Zaragoza, where Goya had gone by invitation of General Palafox to depict the ruins of the city besieged by the French.¹⁰ He spent two months there together with the artists Juan Gálvez and Ferdinando Brambilla, who subsequently published a series entitled Las ruinas de Zaragoza (The Ruins of Zaragoza, 1812-13) completely in line with the stereotypes of the Spanish press of the period. The emblematic battles, the ruins of the city - close to Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime as arousing dread - and the portraits of heroes all complied with an ideal of realism capable of furthering the aims of propaganda and commemoration.¹¹ Goya refused to conform, seeking instead to develop a process of stylistic synthesis and shifting attention from the contingent event to violence itself.¹² Majestic ruins gave way to horrifying close-ups of faces and bodies tortured by suffering in a crescendo of pietism built up on references to Christian iconography that were, however, decontextualised, simplified in their forms and rendered abstract. Slender black lines prove extraordinarily effective in conveying the horrors of every scene of war, in which all of the civil and religious institutions take part, plunging the viewer into the state of alarm and terror recounted by the prints themselves. All are equal, whether enlightened or conservative, with respect to the dynamics of war and hence of death.¹³ The style changes in the last part of the series, from no. 65 to no. 82, known as the Caprichos enfáticos, where Goya takes up the allegorical approach already tried out in the Caprichos to launch a fierce attack on the absolute monarchy of Ferdinando VII.¹⁴ 

Alessandra Franetovich   

¹ The numerous publications on Goya’s graphic art include the following: Sánchez Cantón 1949; Harris 1964; Lafuente Ferrari 1977; Glendinning 1978; V. Bozal, “Los Caprichos: el mundo de la noche”, in Francisco de Goya grabador 1992; Pérez Sánchez, Gallego 1994; C. Garrido Sanchez, “La técnica goyesca de grabado, la otra imagen de Goya”, in Congreso Internacional Goya 1996, pp. 183-195; Matilla 1999.

² The engraving is hard to date. It may have been produced in 1774 on the occasion of the birth of his first son, Antonio Juan Ramón y Carlos.

³ Goya worked at the Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara from 1775 under Anton Raphael Mengs, the artistic director at the time, producing cartoons for tapestries to hang in the royal palaces. These depictions of carefree scenes already afford glimpses of the interest in the metaphorical dimension of images that was to be developed more consciously in the Caprichos. 

⁴ Id. 2016, p. 165.

⁵ Carrete Parrondo 2007, p. 27.

⁶ For further information on the Disparates, see Camón Aznar 1951; Carrete et al. 1996.

⁷ Bozal 1994.

⁸ The changes also include modification of the inscription on no. 69 and the use of aquatint, contrary to the original intentions, on plate 7 (Wilson-Bareau 2016, p. 171).

⁹ Not included in the copy of Desastres de la Guerra owned by Jaime Machén Casalins, the last two engravings were subsequently identified by Paul Lefort after coming directly into his possession. The French scholar, who is also the author of some of the first studies on Goya’s engravings, donated the two missing plates to the Real Academia in exchange for a number of editions of Goya after his initial offer to sell them, put forward in January 1970, was refused (Wilson-Bareau 2016, pp. 171-172).

¹⁰ Canellas López 1981, p. 362.

¹¹ Madrid 2008, pp. 259-260; Lafuente Ferrari 1952.

¹² Mélida 1863, pp. 268-269.

¹³ Bozal 1994.

¹⁴ Wilson-Bareau 2016, p. 166.