PRADO, Black Paintings - F. Goya

The Napoleonic invasion of Spain marked a breaking point in Goya's life. Until then his painting had been open to the lights and colors of eighteenth-century traditions; after this point we can see the grandiose and tragic events of the end of the Old Regime and the turmoil created by Napoleon depicted with an intense sensitivity.

Anguished and horrified, Goya began to paint sinister images which were the result of a macabre and restless imagination. A persistent theme that strikes you in his paintings, and especially in his etchings and drawings, are the myriad forms of human violence depicted, which is an obsession that culminates in the Caprichos and "Disasters of War" etchings.

Deeply troubled by the War of 1808 and the repression of popular uprisings at the hands of Napoleon's troops, Goya dedicated two paintings to the insurrection of Madrid, and in particular the Shooting of May 3, 1808, a painting that will surely stick in your mind thanks to its realism and refusal to resort to any form of rhetoric.

The horror vertex is reached with the Pinturas Negras/Black Paintings, which are the murals that Goya painted around 1820 for the so-called "Quinta del Sordo", his country house on the Manzanares River....