Volaverunt Goya’s engravings revisited by the contemporary eye Temporary exhibition

This series, consisting of 80 plates, was not published until 1863, 35 years after the artist's death. With Disasters of war, Goya became a chronicler of the Peninsular War (1808-1814), the Iberian theatre of the Napoleonic Wars.

The series does not lack for detail when showing the violence and cruelty of the conflict, with depictions of piles of corpses and mutilated bodies, abuse and rape, in scenes that show the ravages of war. The images are accompanied by eloquent quotes that emphasise the drama, which often finds its form in the figure of a woman. However, these prints transcend the historical testimony of a specific conflict, and can be read today as a universal cry against violence and war.

Considered the least thematically unified series of the four, Disasters (which was initially titled Terrible consequences of the bloody war in Spain with Bonaparte. And other emphatic whims) ends with the 'Emphatic whims', an anticlerical and critical compendium of the absolutist regime, which connects with the allegorical images of the Caprices series