An heroic feat. With dead men
1810 - 1815. Wash, Drypoint, Etching on wove paper.Not on display
The title of this print might seem flippantly satirical were it not for the brutality of the scene it represents. It should therefore be understood as an oxymoron whose antithetical elements express Goya´s indignation at the extreme violence of events. Traditionally, the victims of this aggression have been identified as French soldiers, given the moustache on the head that has been staked to the tree branch. It is likely that the etching is inspired by the slaughter that took place in Chinchón on 27 December 1808. After four French soldiers were murdered, French troops responded by attacking the town: they sacked and burned many buildings and executed 86 townspeople, some in the streets of Chinchón and others on the road to Aranjuez, where the barracks of the imperial troops had been set up. It is therefore likely that Goya sought to create a sequence between plate 37, Esto es peor (This is worse) and this one, plate 39, with the insertion of another print between them representing the vengeance of French troops: plate 38, Barbaros! (Barbarians!). In recent years, historical records of the Peninsular War have shed light on the brutality of Spanish guerrilla fighters toward captured French soldiers and vice versa, violating the traditional rules of war between armies that had been the norm and generating a spiral of violence based on vengeance and terror.This print, like so many others from the series, manages to extract from specific events the essence of violence that is implicit in them. The reality that inspired the image is thus relegated to a secondary plane, as is the identity and individual nature of its victims. Lacking any iconographic features that would enable us to identify one faction or another, these bodies have become generic. The corpses are treated according to the classical canons of physical beauty; thus, the abuses they have suffered accentuate the tragic destruction of beauty and reason, essentially classical ideals of life. In addition, Goya eloquently makes manifest the way in which these men have been stripped of their dignity with the streams of blood that are the signs of their castration. With the amputated limbs and the merging of bodies and tree trunk -to which they are firmly tied with ropes that augment the tension of the image- Goya expresses an extreme form of violence that implies the objectification of the human body, which, here, has even been denied the dignity of death (Matilla, J. M.: Portrait of Spain. Masterpieces from the Prado, Queensland Art Gallery-Art Exhibitions Australia, 2012, p. 215).
