It’s a hard step!
1810 - 1814. Burnished wash, Burin, Etching, Drypoint on wove paper.Not on display
Execution scenes constitute one of the most outstanding thematic groups in the series. The significant number of prints depicting different versions of this form of repression and extreme violence—Disasters 14, 15, 26, 28, 29, 31 and 39—includes some of the most impressive in terms of expressivity and formal perfection. Viewed as a group, they offer a broad panorama of the terrible diversity of repressive measures taken by both sides of the war. In It’s a hard step!, as in so many other scenes by Goya, there is a semantic ambiguity that allows for different points of view, and this is manifest in texts about this image. Who has been hanged—French soldiers or Spanish guerillas? Early commentators such as Mélida and Brunet interpreted this print as an illustration of the Spanish authorities’ executions of canon Calvo’s collaborators following the latter’s slaughter of Frenchmen in Valencia in 1808. Dérozier later found references in this image to the executions of “frenchified” Spaniards following the extremely summary trials held in Spanish villages and towns after the revolt of 1898. And these works have more recently been linked to the French decrees of 1809 that established tribunals to punish Spanish guerrillas and their collaborators (Vega 1992, pp. 33-34). According to this last idea, the print would not be a image descriptive of certain events, but instead a criticism of those traditional sectors of Spanish society that sought to convert the conflict into a religious war, tricking the ignorant people and leading them to a death with their blessing, just as the clergyman does here by hearing the condemned man’s confession and absolving him. The scene is filled with expressions that effectively convey the moment’s tragic content, including the hands, whose gestural language is steeped in the tradition of religious painting as a means of transmitting the scene’s importance: the tension of the executioner’s hands as they raise the victim, the latter’s, bound at the wrists, that are joined in submission or prayer; those of the priest, with his authoritarian gesture of blessing; and finally, those of the already hanged man in the background, which dangle lifelessly. The different attitudes of each figure are also visible in their facial expressions: defeat, effort, surprise and power. The title is equally eloquent: the step leading to death is so hard that the victim cannot take it by himself. The capturing of a precise moment in time is one of the Disasters’ most interesting contributions. It is not a matter of simply representing a situation, bur rather of including indications that allow us to capture the scene’s momentary nature in a way we would now consider cinematographic. This print is a perfect example, as can be clearly seen in how the figures of the two hanged victims behind the ladder appear to be still swinging. Their angles help the viewer grasp that they have just been thrown off the ladder and may still be momentarily alive. In the face of this representation of the moment, the remaining figures in the composition become antecedents. This formula was also applied to other prints from the Disasters, as well as in The Third of May. (Text from Matilla, J.M.: Duro es el paso, in Goya en tiempos de guerra, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008, p. 300)
