Plate 23 from ‘The Disasters of War’ (Los Desastres de la Guerra): ‘The Same Elsewhere.’ (Lo mismo en otras partes.)

Description

In The Same Elsewhere, Francisco Goya gathers bodies beneath a dark rocky overhang. Clothing, limbs and faces overlap in a disordered heap, with the sheltering space failing to protect those within it. Closely worked lines build the weight of the rock above the lighter figures. The stillness is not peaceful: it is the silence left when action and resistance have ended.

Plate 23 of The Disasters of War insists that the losses shown in neighboring images are repeated in other places. Goya’s title broadens a single scene into a pattern without identifying a particular battlefield or community. The enclosed setting gives the dead an almost hidden presence, as though awaiting discovery. By refusing both military distinction and heroic arrangement, the print makes shared vulnerability more important than the opposing causes for which people fought.

Read our guide to giclée prints or browse the Goya collection.