Plate 16 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de La Guerra): They make use of them (Se aprovechan)
ca. 1810 (published 1863)
Medium
Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin, burnisher
Dimensions
Plate: 6 5/16 × 9 1/4 in. (16 × 23.5 cm) Sheet: 9 15/16 × 13 9/16 in. (25.3 × 34.5 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Mrs. Grafton H. Pyne, 1951
Accession Number
51.530.2(16)
Tags
Art Historical Context
In Francisco de Goya's haunting *Plate 16: They make use of them ( aprovechan)* from his seminal series *The Disasters of War* (Los Desastres de La Guerra), created around 1810 amid the Peninsular War (1808–1814), we witness the unsparing brutality of conflict. This etching captures soldiers exploiting the bodies of the dead—evident from tags like "Soldiers," "Male Nudes," "Death"—serving as a raw indictment of war's dehumanizing horrors during Spain's fight against Napoleon's invading forces. Goya, a master of Romanticism, documented these atrocities privately, as the series remained unpublis...
About the Artist
Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes) · 1746–1828
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was a Spanish painter and printmaker considered the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Rising from modest provincial origins to become First Court Painter to Charles IV, Goya's career spanned the Enlightenment's optimism and the brutal Napoleonic invasion that shattered it. A mysterious illness in 1793 left him permanently deaf and ...