The Third of May 1808

• 1. Introduction

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  The Third of May 1808 is a painting that asks you to look at something almost unbearable. Francisco Goya completed it in 1814, and it shows the moments before dawn on the 4th of May 1808, when French soldiers lined up hundreds of Spaniards outside Madrid and shot them. The man at the center of the canvas kneels with his arms flung wide. His shirt is white and yellow, the heraldic colors of the papacy. His right hand carries marks that resemble stigmata. He is not a saint. He is not a hero. He is a man who is about to die, and he knows it.

  The art historian Kenneth Clark called The Third of May "the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention." That claim is worth pausing on. Centuries of painters had depicted war, martyrdom, and execution before Goya put brush to canvas. What made this one different? What did Goya break, and what did he build in its place? And how did a painting locked in storage for perhaps forty years come to inspire a peace symbol, a series by Edouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso's Guernica?

• 2. The Road to May 1808

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  Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself First Consul of the French Republic on the 10th of November 1799, and by 1804 he had crowned himself Emperor. Spain's geographic position gave it enormous strategic value: it controlled access to the Mediterranean. The Spanish king, Charles IV, was widely regarded as ineffectual. Even within his own court he was described as a "half-wit king who renounces cares of state for the satisfaction of hunting." Napoleon saw an opening.

  The scheme Napoleon arranged was elegant in its cynicism. He proposed that France and Spain jointly conquer Portugal, with each nation claiming a third of the spoils and the remaining third going to the Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy, who would also receive the title Prince of the Algarve. Godoy accepted. What he did not grasp was that the king's own son, Ferdinand VII, was using the coming invasion as cover for his own power grab. Ferdinand intended for Godoy to die in the ensuing struggle and for his own parents to be sacrificed.

  In November 1807, some 23,000 French troops entered Spain without meeting resistance, ostensibly to march on Lisbon. By the following February, Napoleon's true intentions were visible, but the occupying forces found little pushback. Charles IV abdicated on the 19th of March 1808 in favor of Napoleon's brother Joseph Bonaparte. A French agent in Madrid captured the mood of the population in a dispatch: "Spain is different. The Spaniards have a noble and generous character, but they have a tendency to ferocity and cannot bear to be treated as a conquered nation."

  That warning proved accurate. On the 2nd of May 1808, news spread through Madrid that the remaining members of the Spanish royal family were to be removed to France. The city rose up. Marshal Joachim Murat, Napoleon's principal commander, issued a proclamation to his troops that day: "The population of Madrid, led astray, has given itself to revolt and murder. French blood has flowed. It demands vengeance. All those arrested in the uprising, arms in hand, will be shot." The reprisals came before the next dawn, at several locations around the city. Hundreds of Spaniards were rounded up and executed. The civilian resistance that followed would last five years and become the first conflict widely called a guerrilla war.

• 3. Goya's Difficult Position

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  Francisco Goya had welcomed the ideals of the French Revolution and had hoped for something similar in Spain. Several of his close friends, including the poets Juan Melendez Valdes and Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, were openly Afrancesados, the term for those who supported or collaborated with Joseph Bonaparte's government. Goya's 1798 portrait of the French ambassador Ferdinand Guillemardet, who later became a military commandant, suggests a personal warmth toward that world.

  And yet Goya remained as court painter, a position that required an oath of loyalty to Joseph. He was, by his own nature, someone who disliked authority instinctively. He watched French troops subjugate the people around him. During the years of occupation, he produced almost nothing on canvas. The experiences fed instead into his sketchbooks, producing drawings that would eventually become the print series The Disasters of War.

  By February 1814, after the French had finally been expelled and Ferdinand VII restored to the throne, Goya approached the provisional government with a formal request. He wished, he wrote, "to perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions of our glorious insurrection against the Tyrant of Europe." The government accepted his proposal. Goya had actually made the suggestion himself. Whether he personally witnessed the rebellion of the 2nd of May or the executions that followed it is unknown, despite many later attempts by scholars and biographers to place him at those events.

• 4. What the Canvas Shows

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  A square lantern sits on the ground between two groups of men. That single light source organizes everything. The victims to the left receive the brightest illumination; the firing squad to the right stands engulfed in shadow, painted as a single monolithic mass. Kenneth Clark wrote that Goya, "by a stroke of genius, has contrasted the fierce repetition of the soldiers' attitudes and the steely line of their rifles, with the crumbling irregularity of their target."

  The soldiers are seen nearly from behind. Their bayonets and their shako headgear form what the painting treats as a wall, not a group of individuals. Most of their faces are hidden. The face of one man to the right of the central victim peers fearfully toward the soldiers, acting as a repoussoir that draws the eye back into the central drama. Behind the hillside and the shakos, a crowd with torches is visible: possibly onlookers, possibly more soldiers, possibly the next group of condemned.

  In the lower left of the canvas lies a corpse, splayed and disfigured to a degree that Goya refuses to soften. The viewer's perspective drops there: while the rest of the painting is seen roughly along a central horizontal axis, here the point of view shifts downward, so that the eye looks down onto the mutilated body. There is no room for the sublime, and no compositional gesture toward resurrection.

  The brushwork carries none of the pleasing finish associated with technical mastery. Colors are confined to earth tones and black, with bright flashes of white and the red of blood. The pigment itself is granular, producing a matte and sandy finish that anticipates the direction Goya's later work would take. A steeple looms in the nocturnal distance, along with what may be the barracks used by the French.

• 5. Breaking from Tradition

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  Painters before Goya had long treated violence and martyrdom through a set of recognizable conventions. Works depicting suffering, such as those by Jusepe de Ribera, used artful technique and harmonious composition to suggest the martyr's coming reward. The light in such paintings served a spiritual function: Baroque masters including Caravaggio perfected the dramatic lantern precisely because illumination had become a metaphor for the presence of God.

  Goya borrowed those visual tools and turned them to opposite ends. The central figure's pose has often been compared to a crucified Christ, and his nocturnal ordeal echoes depictions of Christ's Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The stigmata-like marks on his right hand reinforce the parallel. The lantern at the center references the traditional attribute of the Roman soldiers who arrested Christ in that garden. But Goya's lantern grants no miracle. It exists only so that the firing squad can see its targets. The traditional role of light as a conduit for the spiritual has been turned around: here it serves execution.

  The man in white and yellow is not granted individual heroism. His plea is not directed toward God in the manner of Christian art; it faces an unresponsive firing squad. Biographer Fred Licht argued that, for the first time in Western painting, individual nobility in martyrdom is replaced by futility, mass victimization, and anonymity as a feature of modern life. Equally new is the painting's treatment of time. Earlier art had depicted violent death as a conclusive episode. The Third of May refuses that resolution: behind the central victim stand others awaiting the same fate, and the corpse in the foreground confirms the outcome. The procession has no end.

  Some early critics found the painting technically flawed. The perspective, they said, is flat; the victims and executioners stand implausibly close. Richard Schickel countered that Goya was not pursuing academic correctness but rather forcing the maximum emotional impact from the composition. Even the Romantic painters who also engaged with war and injustice, including Theodore Gericault in the Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) and Eugene Delacroix in Liberty Leading the People (1830), composed with greater deference to beauty. Goya discarded that deference entirely.

• 6. Silence, Storage, and Recognition

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  For a painting that would eventually be counted among the most important in the Prado's collection, The Third of May had a remarkably quiet early life. No details survive about its first exhibition, and no contemporaneous accounts mention it. The restored Bourbon government under Ferdinand VII favored neoclassical art and had little appetite for images of popular revolt. A monument to the fallen, also commissioned in 1814 by the provisional government, was stopped by Ferdinand VII because the senators and heroes of the independence war held reforming tendencies he found unwelcome.

  According to some accounts, the painting spent thirty to forty years in storage before the public ever saw it. An 1834 Prado inventory confirms the government retained it; the royal collection had largely passed to the museum when it opened in 1819. The writer Theophile Gautier mentioned seeing "a massacre" by Goya during a museum visit in 1845, and another visitor recorded it in 1858, though both references mislabeled the scene as the second of May rather than the third.

  By 1867 the painting had gained enough standing that Goya's biographer Charles Emile Yriarte considered it worthy of its own special exhibition. Not until 1872, however, did The Third of May appear in the Prado's published catalog, listed as Scene of the Third of May 1808. The painting and its companion piece, The Second of May, left Madrid only once: during the Spanish Civil War, when both were transported by truck to Valencia for safekeeping. That journey caused damage. Significant paint losses on the left side of The Second of May were deliberately left unrepaired until a restoration of both paintings in 2008, timed to mark the bicentennial of the uprising. In 2009 the Prado selected The Third of May as one of the museum's fourteen most important works, to be displayed in Google Earth at a resolution of 14,000 megapixels.

• 7. An Afterlife in Art

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  Gerald Holtom's peace sign, created in 1958, drew on the central figure's posture: arms outstretched, kneeling, exposed. That a painting of a man about to be shot by a firing squad became the visual root of the 20th century's most recognized symbol of nonviolence says something about the reach of Goya's composition.

  Edouard Manet produced a series of paintings that engaged directly with The Third of May. Pablo Picasso returned to it twice: in Massacre in Korea and, more obliquely, in Guernica. The Disasters of War, the print series Goya had been developing during the occupation years, also carries its traces. The early prints in that series, which the album of proofs now held in the British Museum suggests predate the commission for the two paintings, include two works with closely related compositions. One print, titled No se puede mirar, or One Cannot Look at This, places a female figure with arms outstretched but pointing downward, while another figure prays and others shield their faces. The soldiers in that print are invisible except for the tips of their bayonets. A slightly later print, Y no hay remedio, or And It Cannot Be Helped, shows a shako-wearing firing squad seen from the front rather than the rear, pressing the scene toward the viewer rather than away.

  The Second and Third of May were intended as parts of a larger series. Jose Caveda wrote in his 1867 memoirs of the Royal Academy of four paintings by Goya depicting the events of the 2nd of May, and the artist and collector Cristobal Ferriz described two additional works on the theme: a revolt at the royal palace and a defense of artillery barracks. Those two paintings have since disappeared. One explanation is official displeasure at images of popular insurrection under a government that had already stopped a monument to the same dead.