The consequences
1814 - 1815. Etching on wove paper.Not on display
An understanding of the Caprichos enfáticos (Emphatic caprichos), the third part of The Disasters of War, which spans plates 65 to 82, must take into account various aspects of the repression and the restoration of absolutism marked by Ferdinand VII's return to Spain. The fullest expression of the new political order is to be found in the text of the royal decree from 4 May 1814: In accordance with the resolute and general demonstrations of the will of my peoples, and because those demonstrations were just and well-founded, I declare ... that that constitution [i.e., the liberal Constitution of 1812, promulgated by the Cortes of Cádiz in Ferdinand's absence] and such decrees null and void, now and forever, as if such acts had never taken place and had been erased from the past ... And since anyone who should seek to uphold those acts, contradicting my royal decree, made in accordance with the will of my peoples, would commit an outrage against the prerogatives of my sovereignty and the felicity of the nation, causing disturbance and unrest in my realms, I declare whosoever should dare or attempt such to be guilty of lese-majesty, and therefore subject to the penalty of death, whether he commit the crime in actions or in writing or in speech.Unlike the previous more narrative compositions in the series, Goya returns, in this last group, to the allegorical language that he had deployed in the Caprichos series. From this point forward, throughout the last years of his life, this allegorical style would be a constant in his work, culminating in Los Disparates and the so-called Black paintings. It is likely that the currency of the subjects he deals with in this section -the struggle between Ferdinand's servile supporters and Spanish liberals, the repression of the latter, the re-establishment of the Inquisition and the abolition of the liberal Constitution of 1812- motivated Goya's use of a cryptic and ambiguous visual language in which ideas that were critical of the absolutist state would not seem terribly explicit and therefore compromising for the artist.The dark imagery of this part of the series also manifests the artist's disillusionment with these events. The grotesque imagery, a constant in his subsequent work, in which humankind loses its humanity, is also significant: human figures, here, are animalised as a reflection of the baseness of their actions. In this process of dehumanisation -or animalisation- wolves, vampires, vultures, owls and other monstrous beings, half-way between man and beast, oppress humans or bring them to their death.This last section of the series is a devastating criticism of the rulers who, contrary to the common good (a concept frequently employed to justify government policies), dictated laws based on the privileges of the Ancien Régime. The nocturnal animals that fill plate 43 from the Caprichos, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters), etched nearly 20 years before this one, reappear here pouncing like vampires -in the words of Lafuente Ferrari- on the exhausted body that might represent post-war Spain, feeding on his weak, thin blood (Matilla, J. M.: Portrait of Spain. Masterpieces from the Prado, Queensland Art Gallery-Art Exhibitions Australia, 2012, p. 220).
