The Third of May 1808 in Madrid
Francisco de Goya (1746 to 1828) · 1814
Night on a hill outside Madrid. A line of French soldiers, faceless, backs to us, aims at a group of Spanish prisoners by the light of a great square lantern. One man in a white shirt throws his arms wide, eyes huge, at the instant before the volley. Beside him a friar prays, another man covers his face, one stares at the guns with clenched fists. On the ground in front lies a body already shot, face down in its blood. Behind, more prisoners wait their turn on the path, and the dark bulk of the city sits under a black sky. It is the morning of the third of May 1808, the day after the people of Madrid rose against the occupying army of Napoleon.
Goya makes the picture from light. The lantern turns the white shirt into a blaze at the centre and throws everything else into the shadow of the soldiers, whose rigid line is answered by the ragged group of victims. Look at the man in white, whose open arms echo a crucifixion and whose right palm bears a mark like a stigma. The faces of the condemned are individual; the killers have none. The paint is rough and quick, the blood a smear, the hill a few brown strokes, and this urgency has made the painting the model for every image of political killing since, from Manet to Picasso.
Goya proposed the picture and its companion, the Second of May, to the restored government in 1814 to commemorate the uprising, and he was paid for materials. The paintings were not much liked at first and spent decades in storage; this one was damaged in a road accident in 1937 when it was evacuated from Madrid during the Civil War, and the loss at the left edge was only made good in 2008. Stand where the soldiers stand and you are in the firing line.
Did You Know? Goya, who was deaf and in his late sixties, claimed to have visited the site with a servant and to have seen the bodies, though no one has been able to confirm the story.
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