From El Greco's compressed cosmos in late-sixteenth-century Toledo to Antoni Tàpies's matter paintings in late-twentieth-century Barcelona, ten Spanish painters built the visual vocabulary the rest of Europe and the Americas borrowed from. The decisions each one made, and the line between them.

Guernica is the most famous anti-war painting of the twentieth century — but it is also a specific argument, built piece by piece out of a visual grammar Goya invented in 1814. The bull, the horse, the lit lamp, the screaming mother, the broken sword. What each part of Guernica says, and the line of paintings that taught Picasso how to say it.

Before Goya, European painters showed war as triumph. After Goya, they could no longer pretend. The Third of May 1808 ended the heroic battle picture and invented the painting of senseless violence — a tradition that runs through Manet, Picasso, and every photograph of war we have made since.

Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son between 1819 and 1823, in oil applied directly to the plaster wall of the dining room of his house outside Madrid. He was in his seventies, deaf for thirty years, recovering from a near-fatal illness, and living alone in a country property called the Quinta del Sordo — the House of the Deaf Man. He did not sign the painting. He did not title it. He did not intend it to be seen. Saturn is one of fourteen pictures Goya painted on

Searching for Francisco Goya's The Coven? This is the painting: a Black Painting from 1821-1823, a Devil in goat form presiding over a circle of witches, painted directly onto Goya's own dining-room wall. What the painting shows, why he painted it, and how to bring the fine print home.

A man in a white shirt throws his arms wide before a firing squad on a hill above Madrid. Goya painted the night six years after it happened — and built every modern war painting that came after.

Two Witches' Sabbath paintings, twenty-five years apart. How Francisco Goya used the supernatural to attack the very institutions that fed it.