Art History Romanticism: Goya - Third of May, 1808. 1814-15

Romanticism in Goya’s Third of May
Painted on a canvass 8ft. high and 11ft. wide, Francisco de Goya’s Third of May, 1808 is a testament of human cruelty and irrationality ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Kleiner", "given" : "Fred S.", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "edition" : "15th", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2015" ] ] }, "publisher" : "Wadsworth Publishing", "title" : "Gardner's Art through the Ages", "type" : "book" }, "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=a0a42404-800b-41d0-ad25-c65747ceac07" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "formattedCitation" : "(Kleiner, 2015)", "plainTextFormattedCitation" : "(Kleiner, 2015)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Kleiner, 2015)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Kleiner, 2015). It recalls that fateful day at the beginning of the Peninsula War, and in vivid detail.
To compose the painting, Goya created divided the painting into three sections. The first includes the soldiers, the second, the Spanish rebels, and the upper half of the painting depicts the dark skyline of Madrid. On the right side is darkness, as if swallowing every one of the soldiers – their clothes almost melting in the background. Among these soldiers, there is no individuality as their clothes and their stance are all the same. Painted with their back to the viewer, their faces obscured, one can feel a sense of coldness and dread. These men do not realize what pain there are inflicting, with killing becoming a normal task.
The scene on the rights is a stark contrast: whereas the soldiers are shadowed, the Spanish rebels are illuminated by the lamp. On their faces is obvious horror for the death of their comrades, but one rebel stands in the middle, arms outstretched, surrender on his face. But his stance says differently. This is not a defeated man, he is instead, pleading for the French troops to listen to reason, to understand why they had to do what they did, and perhaps spare the lives of the other rebels. Meanwhile, the upper half of the painting is still cloaked in darkness, as if to say, the despair of the war will continue for a few more years, but light brought by the uprising of this small band of Spanish rebel...