Truth has died
1814 - 1815. Etching, Burnisher on wove paper.Not on display
The album of prints that Goya presented to his friend, the writer Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, was inscribed, The terrible consequences of the bloody war in Spain against Bonaparte. And other emphatic caprichos. The album began with the premonitory image of a wretched man weighed down by helplessness in the face of the horror of impending war. The end of the Disasters series reveals the accuracy of that premonition, though Goya leaves us with a glimmer of hope.The last three prints of the Caprichos enfáticos (plates 79, 80 and 82), which constitute the series´ colophon, maintain the allegorical characteristics of the other prints in this section, though they are thematically different from the earlier images: the political message of the sequence is evident. Murió la verdad (Truth has died), shows the body of a young woman lying inert on the ground, dressed all in white with her breasts exposed. The light irradiating from her body allows us to see the group of figures surrounding her and the attitudes they adopt at her burial. Throughout Disasters, Goya uses the female body, at times with markedly erotic overtones, to present the tragedy of war. Once again he returns to this motif to represent the allegorical figure of Truth -which illuminates everything- to the right of whom is the figure of Justice, similarly dressed, lamenting Truth´s demise. Meanwhile, a bishop wearing his mitre appears to bless the corpse, while at the same time two monks with spades prepare -happily it would seem- to dig her grave. Behind them numerous members of the clergy attend the ceremony betraying greater or lesser degrees of interest. Among them we also see the figure of a man carrying a walking stick whose eyes are blindfolded. The criticism of the Church is evident and suggests a political interpretation of the print that would refer to the restoration of the Church´s privileges following the abolition of the Constitution of 1812 by Ferdinand VII´s decree of 4 May 1814.The connection of this print to the following one, plate 80, is made explicit with the question posed by the latter´s title, Si resucitará? (Will she rise again?). Given the ironic character of many of Goya´s titles, it is possible to view what some have interpreted as that etching´s more hopeful tone in a less optimistic light. Those who view the question as ironic argue that such an interpretation would correspond to the scepticism that characterises a substantial portion of Goya´s last works. For, should Truth resuscitate, there hovering over her once again are all the nocturnal beings that in other prints represent the return to the Ancien Régime, ready to finish her off through their laws and use of force, keeping humanity silenced and hobbled, like the man in the shadows of Murió la Verdad. The last print in this sequence, Esto es lo verdadero (This is the truth, plate 82), more closely represents Goya´s hopes than it does the reality of the country after the war. The economic collapse and the social schisms that characterised Spain after the Napoleonic Wars, along with the return, under Ferdinand VII, of the political and religious ideology that had prevailed before the Constitution of 1812, left no room for hope, as Goya makes clear in earlier prints. Thus, he presented what he considered the antithesis of this situation: an idyllic world, perhaps from the past, in which Peace, crowned with an olive wreath, rests her hand on the shoulder of the man beside her -significantly, a figure that evokes philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau´s natural man, a primitive country labourer uncorrupted by egotism- and reveals to him that only by working the land and reaping its fruits can he return to a prosperous life of wellbeing.Despite the apparent disorder of The Disasters of War, there is an internal organising logic that presents the various themes grouped together; creates ties between various prints through their titles; and establishes sequences in which Goya, through a kind of narrative, has developed his moral considerations on the perversity of war (Matilla, J. M.: Portrait of Spain. Masterpieces from the Prado, Queensland Art Gallery-Art Exhibitions Australia, 2012, p. 223).
