Ravages of War (Estragos de la guerra)

In this print Goya depicts the effects of a bombardment on the interior of a house. His inspiration possibly came from one of the bombardments which took place during the first siege of Zaragoza that he would have known about, although this kind of event would have been common during the war.

Within the house everything has been destroyed by the explosion: the roof beams are falling down, the furniture is in disarray, and there are bodies piled up on the floor, as well as one figure that seems to be thrown forward by the blast.

Goya creates a dark space in this print, perhaps in order to denote that the scene takes place at night, surprising the inhabitants of the house in their nightshirts. This darkness is expressed through the heavy use of etching in dense horizontal lines while the artist employs areas of white for the bodies left by the explosion. The violent postures of the corpses, the expressions of horror on the open-mouthed faces and the chaos inside the room generate a devastating atmosphere.

This print must be related to another catastrophic scene from the Disasters of War series, nº 41, They Escape Through the Flames (Escapan entre llamas). It is also clearly reminiscent of other previous Goya works, such as the two depicting fires, The Fire at Night and Fire in a Hospital, in which the protagonists have also been surprised in the night and flee in terror in their nightshirts. In all of these works Goya deals with catastrophe and its sublime capacity to block our senses and stop reason from operating.