Third of May 1808 in Madrid

The Third of May

FELIPE PRIETO BARREDA 4ºB

06 Video

01 Goya's biography

07 The painting

02 Goya's birthplace

08 Painting description

03 Other Goya's works

Index

09 Painting influence

04 Historical context

10 The end

05 War of Independence

Painter biography

Francisco de Goya

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a famous spanish romantic painter and is considered the most important spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was born in a little town located in Zaragoza in 1746 and died in Bordeaux, France, in 1828. He studied painting in Madrid and became a court painter of the Spanish Crown in 1786 and painted portraits of Spanish Kings like Charles III or Charles IV.

Birthplace

He was born in a little town located in northern Spain in the province of Zaragoza, called Fuendetodos.

Carlos IV and his family

Saturn devouring his son

The Second of May 1808

It is a painting that represents one of the rebellions of the Spanish society against the French.

It is an interpretation of a depiction of the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus.

It represents the royal Spanish family in an oil-on-canvas group portrait painting.

Historical context

On March 17, 1808, the Revolt of Aranjuez ended the reign of King Charles IV of Spain and his wife. Charles’s son, Ferdinand VII, was made king. Taking advantage of the instability in the Spanish crown Napoleon signed with Godoy the Treaty of Fontainebleau, in which Godoy let Napoleon troops pass through Spanish lands in order to invade Portugal. But when the French troops started to get inside Spanish territory Napoleon real plan came to light, with the occupation of all Spanish territory with the exception of Cádiz. The Second of May 1808 Spanish uprising started and with that, the beggining of the War of Independence. That's why the Third of May 1808 portrays the execution of the Spanish insurgents by French troops near Príncipe Pío Hill in Madrid.

Spanish war of independence pictures

Description of the painting

Objective of the painting

Religion in the painting

Not heroism in battle

In this painting Goya does a powerful anti-war statement, Goya criticizes the nations that wage war on one another and he also criticizes the people, considering them as complicits.

The man's pose equates him to christ and it also acts as and assertion of his humanity while the French soldiers merge into faceless.

Goya's painting presents us an anti-hero. With a central figure that is not being perishing heroically in battle, but rather being killed on the side of the road like an animal.

The legacy of the painting

Future artists also admired The Third of May and both Manet and Picasso used it for inspiration in their own portrayals of political murders like in Picasso's Massacre in Korea. Along with Picasso's Guernica, Third of May remains as one of the most chilling images ever created of the atrocities of war.

The end.