Plate 37 from ‘The Disasters of War’ (Los Desastres de La Guerra): ‘This is worse.’ (Esto es peor.)

Description

In This is worse, a mutilated man is impaled on a tree, his body made inseparable from the violence inflicted upon it. Francisco Goya’s This Is Worse confronts the viewer with an atrocity rather than a scene of battle. The contrast between human anatomy and the tree’s branching form makes the act of destruction especially difficult to evade.

Made in 1810 and published in 1863, plate 37 of The Disasters of War uses etching, lavis and drypoint to give this encounter a harsh clarity. The title measures one horror against another without proposing a limit to cruelty. Goya strips away the rhetoric of military achievement, keeping attention on a single person’s violated body. Its force lies in that concentration, making the consequences of war impossible to reduce to an abstract account of victory or defeat.

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