The healthy and the sick
1812 - 1814. Burnisher, Etching, Burin, Aquatint on wove paper.Not on display
Disasters of War, 57, The healthy and the sick.
Goya devoted many of the prints in the first part of The Disasters of War to scenes in which the civilian population is the innocent victim of soldiers´ excesses, particularly with women presented as the object of the invaders´ sexual violence. Although the Disasters do not follow a strict order, there is a structure that allows us to see how Goya approaches his themes in a sequential fashion, even when occasionally certain prints appear to be inserted among other groupings dealing with a different subject. Through these reiterations and alternations, Goya may have sought to convey a sense of the randomness of war, in which one never knows what will happen next. Violence against women is one of the themes that Goya frequently returns to in the first part of the series, and which he occasionally ties together with the titles. Las mugeres dan valor (The women give courage, plate 4), No quieren (They don´t like it, plate 9), Tampoco (Not [in this case] either, plate 10), Ni por esas (Neither do these, plate 11), Amarga presencia (Bitter to be present, plate 13), and Ya no hai tiempo (There isn´t time now, plate 19), among other prints, show the crimes of the French soldiers against women portrayed as examples of beauty and pathos. In many scenes, such as in the present print, Goya makes use of a series of visual devices that help him express these concepts and direct our gaze towards the victims. He gives prominence to the female figures by using very few etched lines to delineate them, thus using white space to outline them against a dark background, while other figures have been intensely etched. The result sometimes gives the appearance of a theatrical set. He also makes use of vaults and arches - architectural motifs whose symbolic purpose is undeniable, shrouding the scene of the crime in shadows and darkness. Goya´s use of architectural space establishes a contrast between the light outside, where a religious building allows us to situate this scene in an urban setting, and the darkness beneath the arches, where the crimes are being committed. As in so many other prints from the series, these examples of cruelty are not limited to isolated, individual actions but are manifestations of collective violence, which also allows Goya to illustrate different stages in the scene he is narrating. Nevertheless, the most dramatic element of this print is the defenseless child lying at its mother´s feet. The diagonal created by the figure of the woman and the arms of the soldier pulling her away is broken by the foreshortening of the halfnaked body of the child. Crying inconsolably, the child extends his tensed hand in a gesture that recalls that of the French soldier in plate 3 trying to protect himself from the blow of an axe; a gesture that there, like here, indicates he will not escape death (Matilla, J. M.: Portrait of Spain. Masterpieces from the Prado, Queensland Art Gallery-Art Exhibitions Australia, 2012, p. 219).
