Suffering Without Hope? The War Art of Francisco Goya

Examining Francisco Goya’s portrayal of war’s brutality through a critical Christian lens.

Francisco Goya’s depictions of the horrors of war in early 19th-century Spain, it could be argued, exemplify the Romantic ethos of self-expression, wherein the artist’s personal and emotional perspectives are conveyed through the subject matter. Goya’s harrowing portrayals of human suffering during wartime are widely regarded as successful in communicating the brutality and anguish of such conflicts, and his work is praised by many for doing so. In writing this, I am giving you my personal response to his work. Some may not agree with my assessment of what is communicated through the art, but I hope that they will at least be persuaded of the arguments I make as to what a Christian artist ought to aim to do.

However, from a Christian perspective, one must consider whether Goya’s works effectively convey the whole reality of the situation. Suffering is a reality that we should not sugarcoat, and we should do everything in our power to prevent it and console those who experience evil and pain. But it is also true that through Christ, there is hope that transcends any suffering. For the Christian, faith in Christ does not necessarily remove earthly suffering, but it does provide a consolation that is deeper and more permanent. This consolation, the peace that ‘passeth understanding’, is what inspires martyrs to praise God and bless their persecutors as flames consume them at the stake. This supernatural consolation is available to us all through his Church.

The risk inherent in Goya’s art is that solely depicting suffering without any counterbalancing elements may leave the viewer mired in a sense of despair which runs counter to the Christian message, and leads him into greater unhappiness and an even more bleak sense of hopelessness. This is what I see when I look at his work–hopelessness. Even in the third image, in which a priest is clutching the cross, the artist seems to me to be communicating that his hope was empty.

Goya’s unrelenting vision of despair is not the whole truth. To be fully reconciled with the Faith, it should more obviously situate the depicted suffering within a broader framework of Christian hope and resurrection. This is not a simple task. Expressing anger at the suffering of oneself or others through ugly distortion of the image is much easier to do than communicating the profound truth that one need not suffer, and that there is a beauty in suffering, when viewed through the prism of the Catholic faith. It takes great skill on the part of the artist to be able to do so.

The Christian traditions of liturgical art, for example, the Baroque, Gothic, and iconographic artistic styles, were forged with this Christian end in mind, and had embedded within their forms, quite apart from the subjects they portrayed, styles that communicated this Christian hope.

Contrast Goya’s work with the painting of soldiers blinded by mustard gas in the First World War, by John Singer Sargent, an image I have featured before on this blog. Sargent portrays the horrors of war clearly, but infused with hope. We see it in human interactions: the blind are being led by those who have sight. The light of the sun pierces the gaseous air. I see Christian hope symbolised in this. Sargent was an American who trained in Paris in the mid-19th century and modelled his style consciously on that of the 17th-century Spanish Baroque master Diego Velázquez. The baroque style is one developed specifically to communicate hope in suffering. It is uniquely suited to portray, therefore, the suffering of war without compromising on revealing the degree of suffering, but at the same time ensuring that Christian hope is portrayed too. Still, it takes a special artist to be able to do this. Sargent was not a Christian, but his mastery of this Christian style — regardless, to my mind, he is one of the greatest — enabled him to communicate something good that transcends the suffering that was undoubtedly present.

This painting hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London, and it is worth going to see it there to get the full impact. It is huge – approximately 7’7” inches 20’, which means that the figures are roughly life-sized. To view it properly, you need to retreat right to the back of the large gallery in which it hangs, to see the whole at a single view.

What lessons can we learn from this today? First, we should recognise that it is a myth that physical suffering is greater today than it was in the past. In my opinion, it is a conceit of the modern era that tells us we have suffered more than others, despite the occurrence of two world wars. If you picked any person at random 500 years ago, the chances of an early death and great physical suffering along the way, due to any number of causes such as illness, starvation, and of experiencing brutality at the hands of others, were greater than any individual, again picked at random, even at the height of WW1 or WW2 or in our inner cities today.

The despair evident in the 20th and 21st centuries, often reflected in its art, reflects the zeitgeist of our era, but this is not the suffering of external circumstances. Instead, it is self-inflicted suffering, which is spiritual, and a result of alienation from God. The responsible artist today would not indulge people in such spiritual despair. That is an approach that only exacerbates the situation. The responsible artist should strive to offer the hope of an alternative path, which is the Christian path and is as open to every person today as it was to people in the past. 

That hope is personified in the picture of the suffering Christ, whose sacrifice opens up to us the joy of partaking of the divine nature. A joy that transcends all earthly suffering.