Plate 64 from ‘The Disasters of War’ (Los Desastres de la Guerra): ‘Cartloads to the cemetery.’ (Carretadas al cementerio.)

Description

In Cartloads to the Cemetery, Francisco Goya shows two men lifting a young woman’s body into a cart already burdened with the dead. One supports her upper body while the other grasps her ankles. A further figure bends to collect another casualty. The bearers’ exertion contrasts with the limp, carefully drawn body they move, giving routine labor a devastating human weight.

Plate 64 of The Disasters of War concludes the series’ famine scenes with the transport of accumulated losses. The title reduces the journey to its grim destination, while the image insists on the person within each load. Goya places the action in a street without making a particular location its subject. The repeated task becomes an indictment of conditions in which death is so widespread that individual mourning yields to the necessity of mass removal.

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