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[T]his proves beyond cavil that in 1820 Goya was a committed, indeed passionate liberal and anti-clerical… So fierce are the drawings on prisoners and the Inquisition, so explosive the joy at the Revolution of Riego, so merciless the exultation at the unfrocking of monks during the secularization, that the inner Goya seems as much of an exaltado as his mistress’s son.

Excerpt from: Gwyn A. Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, 1984

In January 1824 a system of organised repression established “permanent military commissions with executive powers to judge the enemies of absolute power” and laws of strict censorship were imposed. In that same month Goya went into hiding in the house of the Aragonese priest Father José Duaso and he put Rosario in the care of the gentle-faced architect Tiburcio.
On 1 May 1824 a brief amnesty was declared and on the following day Goya applied for leave “to take the mineral waters at Plombières in France, to alleviate the sufferings and infirmities which are such a burden to his old age”.

Excerpt from: Julia Blackburn, Old Man Goya, 2003

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Father, ease our pain and eat us; you who clothed us with this sad flesh; we beseech you: be the one to strip it away.—Dante Alighieri

“Let us frankly march, and I first of all, along the constitutional path.” So announced the chastened king in March of 1820, three years before France, backed by all the royalist powers of Europe, marched on Spain and savagely crushed its revolution. Goya sketched this as an endless procession of staggering friars, priests and nobles, eyes closed, roped together, blindly leading each other into an abyss.

Francisco Goya, No saben el camiino (They do not know the way), Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte. Y otros caprichos enfaticos (The Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte. And Other Emphatic Caprices), (Disasters of War), plate 70 1820-1823The blind leading the blind. Hieronymus Bosch stumbled his two into a stream.1 Cornelis Massijs had his four fall in a hole.2 Pieter Brueghel, the year before his death, piled together six, eyes diseased or missing, the faces raised

as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous

to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster3

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568Goya’s are smaller, off-kilter, dwarfed by the rock. Ignore them, the Bible told him. So, too did his liberal friend Bartolomé José Gallardo y Blanco: “The light of wisdom must illuminate the ways of virtue if we are to follow them with a sure step. Understanding guides the will; with blindfolded eyes and a chained foot, one cannot get very far along the path of perfection.”4

He strips kings of understanding
and leaves them wandering in a pathless wasteland.
They grope in the darkness without a light.
He makes them stagger like drunkards.5

Elsewhere, however, mobs gathered, attacked, and dispersed. He followed their movements, eager for patterns, which he cut through with stories he was told or imagined, or images and ideas he stole. He filled albums with all manner of suffering and sin, waves of violence transformed into mass and line—faces, bodies, weariness, pain.

He was good at this; his eye was good, his memory.

Never his own life, however, never anything personal. The aperture of his intellect was misted and narrowed to everyone but those closest to him—his family and friends, his dogs and his cat. Sometimes, he wondered if there was not indeed a kind of veil over the perceiving faculty of his soul, a thwarting and absorbing cataract of his spirit. For elsewhere, everywhere really, he saw beings he did not know and therefore could not feel anything for, surely cannot have been expected to love, could only observe and outline. He sketched their surfaces with precision. And then he turned the page. Or he looked elsewhere.

At the Dante, for example, the ninth circle, with the Flaxman images, that Moratín had given him. At the things not seen there, not illustrated, the things Flaxman did not dare show, that no one shows, the eating of people, for example. Did he want to see this? Did he want others to see this? The Saturn6 he sketched many times, devouring his sons and daughters, or the shipwrecked, the set adrift, or Conde Ugolino in the ice of the second ring of the lowest circle, eyes askew, gnawing on the wretched skull of the Archbishop like a dog.

I saw two shades frozen in a single hole
packed so close, one head hooded the other one;
the way the starving devour their bread, the soul
above had clenched the other with his teeth
where the brain meets the nape. — (Canto XXXII, lines 124–29)

The Count, teeth scraping and grating on the Archbishop’s ravaged skull, raising his head, wiping his mouth on what little hair persists on the Archbishop’s scalp and saying, “And then my hunger overpowered my sorrow.”

… And I,
Already going blind, groped over my brood
Calling to them, though I had watched them die,
For two long days. And then the hunger had more
Power than even sorrow over me— (Canto XXXIII, ln. 70–73)

Did the Cannibal Count eat his dead children? In the Flaxman, in the Blake and Fuseli, the Count, driven mad by hunger, gnaws his own fingers to the bone. In his little oil, the children clutch their father, who gazes up at the high-up window at the bright metal shaft of the sun. “We hope for light, but there is darkness; for brightness, but we are in gloom.”

We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.

Something like that. No saben el Camino, “They do not know the Way,” stolen from Blake, who stole it from Flaxman, the enchained procession of cloaked and hooded monks descending the crooked path, bound for the fires of hell. Ruin and destruction in their wake. The way of peace they have not known, there is no justice in their tracks.7

Dante was wrong. He was a slave to time, a slave to the world. The inferno—countless infernos—are in this world, not in the next.

Countless infernos. In Camino de los Infiernos, the goblin mob pulls the figure to the fire.

Franvisco Goya, Camino de los Infiernos (Road to Hell), 1821In Populacho —“Rabble”—another is dragged naked through the streets to the scaffold.

Francisco Goya, Populacho (Rabble), Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte. Y otros caprichos enfaticos (The Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte. And Other Emphatic Caprices), (Disasters of War), plate 28, 1820-23In the next one, the same dragged screaming. Lo Merecia— “He Deserved it”.

The king’s chariot was carried on the shoulders of the people to shouts of “Death to the Nation”. General Riego was dragged through the streets and disembowelled by the mob. Leocadia and her son, who had served in the exaltado militia, disappeared.

Goya focussed on his blackest paintings. He started hoarding food and wine. He hid all his engraving plates and prints in the walls.

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1The parable of the blind leading the blind: two blind men walk into a stream. Engraving after H. Bosch. 1600s2Cornelis Massijs, Blinden leiden de blinden, 1544-15563William Carlos Williams, "Parable of the Blind", Pictures from Brueghel, 1962

4Bartolomé José Gallardo y Blanco, Diccionario critico-burlesco, 1811

5Job 12:24-25

6Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Sons, 1820-237John Flaxman, The Death of Ugolino: Groveling Amongst the Dead of Sight Depriv’d, 1793William Blake, Ugolino and His Sons in Prison, 1826Henry Fuseli, Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower, 1806Francisco Goya, Ugolino and His Sons, 1823