Francisco Goya's The Third of May 1808 shows a French firing squad shooting Spanish prisoners at night on the edge of Madrid, the day after the city rose against Napoleon's army. Goya painted it in 1814, when the French had been driven out. Its meaning lies in one contrast: the condemned have faces, and the soldiers have none. The eye lands first on the man in the white shirt, arms thrown wide.
The canvas measures 2.68 by 3.47 meters and hangs in Room 64 of the Prado Museum in Madrid. It is usually read as a protest against war.
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The painting looks like an outburst, a painter's rage laid straight onto canvas. The records describe a job. In February 1814, with the French army gone and a Regency Council ruling Spain in the name of its absent king, the government commissioned Goya to paint two scenes of the uprising of 1808, The Second of May and The Third of May. The Treasury agreed to pay him 1,500 reales a month.
The records also show who the pictures were for, and it was not the crowd. Ferdinand VII, the absent king, took the project over when he came home. The frames were billed to his bedchamber, and the Prado believes the finished canvas hung in the Royal Palace, though no record says so. The museum dates its first public showing to the 1860s, about half a century after Goya put down his brush.
Goya's own past complicates the picture further. In 1810 he painted an allegory of Madrid gesturing toward King Joseph, the brother Napoleon had placed on the Spanish throne. In 1811 Joseph gave him royal honors, which Goya later played down. The painter who made French soldiers faceless had worked for a French king. I read the missing faces as his own decision, not a clause in anyone's contract.
What You'll Discover
Who ordered the painting.
Who got to see it first.
Where the shooting really took place.
Where the light comes from.
What a wartime truck crash did to it.