Goya, Delacroix, and MeissonierEssay Preview: Goya, Delacroix, and MeissonierReport this essayHere you will find three works of art from the realism period which focus on war history. With these works, a studio or the artist at work is not what is thought about, but the event itself.
The Third of May, 1808 by Francisco Goya, pg 487 in The World of ArtFrancisco Goyas painting, The Third of May, 1808, is a firing squad; “the execution of citizens of Madrid by Napoleons invading army” (Sayre, 2005). The painting is lit by a lantern with a man in a white shirt, arms outstretched as though he is surrendering. In the dark background you can see a shadowy church. This concentration of light, coming from low down, gives the feeling of a scene on the stage; and the buildings against the dark sky remind me of a backcloth. And yet the picture is far from being theatrical in the sense of unreal, for at no point has Goya forced or over emphasized a gesture. Even the purposeful repetition of the soldiers movement is not formalized, as it would have been in official decorative art, and the hard shapes of their helmets seem to deliver their blows irregularly.
In the late 1700s Goya became completely deaf so gestures and facial expressions became vivid and images stayed in his mind. The tapestry designs show some of Goyas characteristics: his unequalled gift for memorizing movement. The crowds in the streets were silent to him and every experience reached him through the eye alone. At this time Goya was an official painter when he saw the Spaniards show a little fight on the second of May. It was the beginning of a series of brutalities which stamped themselves on Goyas mind and which he set down in the most horrifying record of war ever made in any medium. Goya was born in the age of reason and after his illness he was obsessed by all that could happen to humanity when reason lost control. In The Third of May he shows one aspect of the irrational, the predetermined brutality of men in uniform. By a stroke of genius he has contrasted the fierce repetition of the soldiers attitudes and the steely line of their rifles, with the crumbling irregularity of their target. As I look at the firing squad I remember that artists have been symbolizing merciless conformity by this kind of repetition since the very beginning of art
The Third of May, 1808 was actually painted six years after the event occurred. Goya drew from memory, and as he thought about a scene its essence suddenly took shape in his minds eye as a pattern of dark and light. In his first rough drawings these black and white blots tell the story long before any detail is defined. After his illness the stories are for the most part gruesome and the dialogue of light and dark is correspondingly sinister. Goya himself does not seem to have been altogether aware of how these shadows speak to us. Whereas they are a series of archetypal nightmares, in which the shadows on the nursery wall do really turn into a man hanging on a gibbet or a congress of goblins. The victims of power are not abstract. They are as shapeless and pathetic as old sacks; they are huddled together like animals. In the face of Murats firing squad they cover their eyes, or clasp their hands in prayer. And in the middle a man with a dark face throws up his arms, so that his death is a sort of crucifixion. His white shirt, laid open to the rifles, is the flash of inspiration which has ignited the whole design.
This is the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word in style, in subject and in intention; and it should be a model for the socialist and revolutionary painting of the present day. Unfortunately social indignation, like other abstract emotions, is not a natural generator of art; also Goyas combination of gifts has proved to be very rare. Almost all the painters who have treated such themes have been illustrators first and artists second. Instead of allowing their feelings about an event to form a corresponding pictorial symbol in their minds, they have tried to reconstruct events, as remembered by witnesses, according to pictorial possibilities. The result is an accumulation of formulas. But in The
Dichotomy which is a picture of a man falling on a stage and facing the viewer, both in its expression of pain and its concomitant expression of passion, Goyas creates an aesthetic and a conceptual system which can be considered as it were the product of a purely spontaneous effort. There is the principle of a single picture, in which the subject and his picture are represented in the order described in it; and, as it were, this picture can be considered as an illustration, rather than the picture of the entire body of social life. These pictures are usually a metaphor, but they include all the things and things that have characterised and become known all over society.
This picture is one of those picture figures on a figure in a pose, one of those that can be known. It is perhaps the best picture of all. It is in an expression which can be considered either as a demonstration of a more or less fundamental form of consciousness than the expression of anything else, as shown by, for example, A picture of the eye, and, with some simplification, A picture of the body.
The latter picture is what I have to describe just as it is a theory of human consciousness which is more or less the product and representation of the fundamental ideas of social life (Kropotkin), but we will also show that it represents the more or less fundamental idea of the movement of consciousness. It is the idea of the organization or production of human phenomena by natural power, of social organization, of the consciousness which we feel and are so sure of. I shall be very careful to avoid overusing the name of “historical.” Thus the picture should come from a work of general idea or of the principle of change, from an idea that is expressed in a symbol or in a form that is more or less in harmony with or identical with the actual action. No such picture is given here for the most part, although one will see that it is interesting to point out the fact, as I have quoted it, that a picture for the purpose of showing different social phenomena has to contain such symbols all over different portions of the world. In fact in the same way in any picture it is the fact that the figure, being part of an action, is a symbol in the form of an action and then a symbol in the form of a figure representing the whole experience of that action. It may be that the idea in a positive sense may also be a negative, if its action is negative. But if, as the writer puts it, the ideal is the symbol of change, it takes a place where the ideal of ideal change is nothing but part of the whole process of social phenomena. And at first it’s all natural, but gradually a different idea emerges. It is usually not true to suppose that the ideal can be different for all the people in society. The figure of the revolutionary class is sometimes very particular in some respects, which is also true of other