The Third of May 1808 means that Goya painted a massacre, not a victory. French soldiers shoot Spanish civilians in Madrid, on the night after the city rose up against Napoleon's occupation, and Goya gave the soldiers no faces, lit only the victims and put the man at the center in the pose of the crucified Christ. He painted it in 1814, six years later, once the French had been driven out.
In February 1814, Goya asked Spain's new government for the job of painting the uprising.
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The painting's first years are almost blank. Frame invoices dated November 29, 1814 survive, and the file of the Prado, the museum in Madrid where it now hangs, adds that the canvases "must have been hung in the Palace, although there is no record of this."
No review survives, and no visitor wrote down what he saw. The king who returned to Spain that year, Ferdinand VII, halted a monument to the uprising's dead. I doubt he wanted this canvas on a wall.
A commission for a victory
The government wanted a victory. In his petition, Goya offered to "perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions" of the uprising. His conditions were accepted in May, and the Treasury would pay him 1,500 reales a month, plus the cost of his materials.
He delivered a pair. The Second of May, also called The Charge of the Mamelukes after the horsemen it shows, covers the street fighting. The Third of May shows what came after. In the first canvas, Madrid fights back. In the second, the men in front of the guns cannot.
A government in 1814 meant something specific by a heroic action: Spaniards winning. The man in the white shirt has no weapon. His arms are open, and the muzzles are a few feet from his chest. I read that as a refusal to flatter anyone.
Many viewers take the scene for something Goya saw with his own eyes. The evidence for that is thin.
What You'll Discover
Whether Goya saw the shooting himself.
What the lantern lights up.
What happened to the pair on a Spanish road.
What the Prado first called it.