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Francisco Goya Research Paper

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The French Revolution, which was a critical period of reformation, was an era in which war happened frequently. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was an important artist of that time, who created many artwork that portrayed wars. In the analysis of his masterpieces, people can find his disappointment in how people pursue freedom, their ignorance, and the brutality of the wars. Freedom was one of the main ideas in French Revolution, but in Goya’s painting, he was disappointed in how the society fought for it. In his artwork, he showed the stupidity of how people pursued freedom during that period. In The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797–1798), Goya used the mocking owls and bats to imply folly and ignorance, while the lynx stayed alert “against the monsters of greed and stupidity” …show more content…

In The Disasters of War (1810–1820), he showed how brutal the French were in the invasion of Spain. In the early plates of the series, Goya depicted “the dead and injured are carried away, soldiers strip corpses, which are then thrown into a common grave” in the Plate 18 — Bury them and keep quiet (Tomlinson 1994, p.191). This picture wholly described how the war looked in Spain during that time: how people were killed and then buried like it was a normal scenario. The ruthlessness of the French also sent out another message that “beauty is not only destroyed, but grotesquely ravaged to attest the end of any faith in an ideal” (p.193). In the paintings, people lost their dignity, and there are no heroes countless unidentified victims in the picture, which indicate that humanity is only ideal in the Revolution (p.202). The hand gestures in the paintings are in motion, which emphasized the instantaneity of the climax. For example, in the painting, the soldiers’ are holding arms and already stabbing it into the victims. The capture of the particular moment reinforce the brutality of people in that

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