Goya's Third of May 1808: The Painting That Changed War Forever
- Zocine Art
- Jun 21
- 6 min read
A man in a white shirt kneels on a hill above Madrid in the middle of the night. His arms are thrown wide. His eyes are open. A lantern on the ground throws hard yellow light up onto his chest. Two metres in front of him, a row of French soldiers in identical shakos and packs aim their muskets at his sternum. He has perhaps three seconds left to live.
This is The Third of May 1808 in Madrid: The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill — Francisco Goya's painting of the reprisal killings carried out by Napoleon's occupying army on the night of 3 May 1808, after a Madrid civilian uprising the day before. Goya painted it in 1814, six years after the event, on commission from the restored Spanish government. It is the painting that ended the heroic tradition of war pictures and started a different one.
What happened on 2 and 3 May 1808
On the morning of 2 May, a crowd of Madrid civilians attacked French troops in the Puerta del Sol after Napoleon's brother Joseph was installed as king. The uprising lasted a single afternoon. By evening, the French commander Marshal Murat had retaken the city and signed an order: every Spaniard found with a weapon — or even a pocket knife — was to be shot without trial.
The reprisals began at first light on 3 May and continued through the night. Civilians were rounded up from their houses, marched to four sites on the edge of Madrid, lined up against walls or the slope of Príncipe Pío Hill, and shot in groups of ten. The exact number killed is unknown — contemporary estimates range from forty-four (the French count) to several hundred (the Spanish count). Goya watched some of it himself from his house on the south side of the city.
The man in the white shirt
The painting is built around a single figure, and almost every compositional decision Goya made is in service of him. He kneels at the centre-right of the canvas, lit from below by the lantern, dressed in a clean white shirt and yellow trousers. His arms are open in the position of a crucifixion — wrists turned outward, palms forward, the stigmata visible on his right palm. He is roughly the same age as Christ at the crucifixion.
The reference is not subtle. Goya is painting a martyrdom. But the man is anonymous — no halo, no inscription, no historical name attached to him. He is a Madrid labourer or shopkeeper, identified only by his cheap shirt and the dirt on his trousers. The painting refuses to ennoble him further than the gesture itself, and refuses to ennoble the cause he died for. He is simply the figure who happens to be next.
The faceless squad
The French soldiers are painted as a single mechanical object. Their faces are turned away from the viewer — only the line of their identical hats, packs, and musket barrels is visible. Their bodies are angled forward at an identical degree of lean. They do not exist as individuals. Goya gives them no expression, no humanity, no name. The viewer cannot extend sympathy to them because there is no face to extend it to.
This is the central pictorial argument of the painting. The conventional war picture before 1814 — Velázquez's Surrender of Breda, Antoine-Jean Gros's Napoleon at Eylau — gave both sides recognisable faces and treated battle as a moral encounter between identifiable men. Goya removes the encounter. One side is a man, in light, with a face. The other side is a machine, in shadow, with a row of barrels. The asymmetry is the point.
The light, and where it comes from
The only light source visible in the painting is a square iron lantern on the ground between the firing squad and the victims. Its yellow light is harsh, low, theatrical — the light of a stage, not the light of a real night. The sky is a near-black wash of brown and blue-grey. Madrid behind the hill is a single grey shape with the dome of San Francisco el Grande just visible.
The lantern is the technical engine of the painting. Without it, the white shirt would not glow. Without the glow, the central figure would not function as the painting's pictorial Christ. Goya needed an artificial light source close to the action because moonlight or torchlight from above would have softened the contrast. The lantern lets him push the white shirt to the maximum value in the painting and leave everything else in controlled middle-tones and shadow.
The figures behind and around
Read the painting from right to left and you see the entire sequence of the killing. On the far right, the soldiers fire. In front of them, the man in the white shirt is one second from death. To his left, a Madrid civilian covers his face with his hands — he cannot watch his own friend die. Behind him, a tonsured monk in brown clenches his fists in prayer. A young man with dark hair looks up at the sky with an expression closer to defiance than to pleading.
In the foreground, two bodies are already dead. Their blood pools on the dust. The figure on the left lies face-down in the same crucified posture as the central man — arms wide, white shirt soaked. To the back of the queue, a longer line of figures stretches into the dark, waiting for their turn. The killing has been going on, the painting says, for hours, and will continue until everyone in the line is dead.
Why no painter had done this before
The war picture had been a heroic genre for three centuries. The painter showed the victorious commander on horseback, the defeated commander handing over a sword, the line of cavalry charging across a meadow under a flag. Casualties were generally off-canvas. When bodies appeared, they were the bodies of soldiers, painted with the dignity of dead Romans on a battlefield.
Goya broke all of it. He painted the civilians, not the soldiers. He painted the murder, not the battle. He gave the killers no faces and the victims no narrative. He composed the canvas around a single anonymous labourer in a cheap shirt and put him in the posture of the crucified Christ — equating, without any ambiguity, the murder of a Madrid shopkeeper with the founding event of Christianity. Nothing of the kind had been attempted before.
The line of descent
Almost every serious war painting of the next two centuries descends from this canvas. Édouard Manet's The Execution of Maximilian (1867) is an explicit homage — Manet keeps the firing squad on the right, the victim on the left, the asymmetric lighting. Picasso's Massacre in Korea (1951) and Guernica (1937) take the same posture for the civilian victim — arms wide, body lit, mouth open in protest. Every modern photograph of a civilian shot by an occupying army composes itself, consciously or not, against the visual memory of this painting.
Goya's other painting from the same commission, The Second of May 1808, shows the daytime cavalry charge — the conventional heroic war picture, the one the genre expected him to paint. He delivered both canvases on the same day in 1814. Only the second one had any descendants.
What Goya did next
After the two May 1808 paintings, Goya retreated to his country house outside Madrid and spent the next four years painting directly onto the plaster walls of the dining room and the room above it. These were the Black Paintings — Saturn devouring his son, the Witches' Sabbath, the pilgrimage to San Isidro — fourteen images made for no patron, never exhibited in his lifetime, and not transferred to canvas until forty years after his death.
Read the dedicated essays on Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son and the Witches' Sabbath — the two Black Paintings that continue the argument of the Third of May about violence, the crowd, and the limits of reason. The chronology runs straight through Goya's late work: the executions in 1814, the Black Paintings between 1819 and 1823, his death in exile in Bordeaux in 1828.
Key takeaways
Goya finished The Third of May 1808 in 1814, six years after the event, on commission from the restored Spanish government. He had watched some of the killing from his own house.
The painting is built around a single anonymous Madrid civilian in a white shirt, posed as a crucifixion. The reference is explicit — open arms, stigmata, the same age as Christ.
The French firing squad has no faces. Goya paints them as a single mechanical object — identical hats, packs, and musket barrels at an identical lean.
The only light source is a square iron lantern on the ground. Its yellow light lets the white shirt glow against the near-black sky and silhouette of Madrid behind.
Almost every serious modern war painting — Manet's Maximilian, Picasso's Guernica, the visual memory of every civilian shot by an occupying army — descends from this canvas.
Browse the Goya prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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