Within Goya’s illustration, The Third of May, you can instantly notice two different groups of people that are posed with conflict. Taking into consideration the time period that the painting was illustrated in, it is evident that these are French soldiers stretching forth their bayonets towards innocent Spanish citizens. Within the bottom left of the image, it appears to be a monk praying over the dead bodies that have been brutally shot at and recklessly tossed to the side, possibly trying to put these individuals at peace with God before departing this world. After noticing the monk in the bottom left corner of the illustration, I began to realize that this picture did, in fact, have a religious context to it along with a hint of political meaning.
To add to the Goya’s usage of religious iconography, if you take a close look at the man in the center of the image wearing the bright white v-neck shirt he is essentially glowing in the picture, despite the genocide occurring near him, it is a certain element about him that causes him to shine in comparison to the images other characters. Looking at the way his arms are angled to that of a V shape along with even the way his palms are angled as if he is pleading for mercy not only for himself but for those near him, it is almost as if Goya is trying to make it as though he is Jesus being crucified. This image correlates with Christianity for the reason is that it symbolizes the persecution of Christians, along with pure inhumane treatment humans bestow upon one another.
From a political standpoint, Goya puts in perspective the fact that the French soldiers see themselves as more or less higher class individuals in comparison to the Spanish civilians, this is noticed as the Frenchmen have no stains their clothes nor are they tattered, whereas all of the Spanish civilians are just shaded more darkly and appear to be more impoverished than the French. I believe Goya’s main purpose in crafting the piece is to highlight the pain and suffering the Spanish were forced to deal with on this day. Throughout this lesson, we learned about Romanticism and the context of what it truly means, it is put on display within this image, there is a large amount of violence occurring towards what appears to be an innocent group of people which in turn causes its viewers to feel a sense of sympathy, these are the ideals of romanticism art.
Personally, I like this image a lot for the reason that it utilizes religious iconography, for example when I noticed the symbolism of the man who appeared to look like Christ I thought that was fairly interesting, however, I feel as though he could have done more to correlate even more religious aspects into it, but I still enjoyed analyzing the image and doing research on Francisco De Goya. Goya once said,’Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.’, I believe that within this quote Goya has just simply lost faith in human nature, in many of his other quotes and paintings, they tend to be fairly dark an deep.
