A giant feasting on his child’s corpse. Innocent civilians being gunned down by French soldiers. A colossus towering over a mass of fleeing people. Depictions of rape, assault, torture, gore, violence. Such was the work of Francisco Goya. 
Born in Spain during the mid-18th century, he lived through wars, famines, the deaths of his wife and children, and other personal tragedies that crippled him physically and mentally. They also drove him to create some of the most gruesome, horrifying, and influential masterpieces of the Romantic period: The Colossus, Saturn Devouring His Son, The Third of May 1808, Witches’ Sabbath.
Goya was arguably the first horror painter, even though several artists before him utilized common horror themes in their work. Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch Renaissance painter who produced some of the most prominent depictions of hell that exist in Western culture. One example is his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s one of those paintings that whenever you look at it, you discover something new. It measures almost thirteen feet wide when open. The left panel represents the Garden of Eden, the right represents hell, and the center represents earthly life.
Bosch’s version of hell includes naked figures impaled with swords, burning buildings, oversized ears with arrows shot through them, vicious human-animal hybrids, dead bodies hanging from the strings of a harp, and other absurdities that would have made Salvador Dali blanch. He used these themes repeatedly in his other religious works, such as The Last Judgment, Visions of the Hereafter, and the Haywain Triptych. It’s not hard to imagine a fallen-away Christian running off to a confessional after seeing a knight in armor being feasted upon by a pack of anteaters in hell.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was another painter with a flair for the freakish. Many of his works feature torture, death, violence, and gore. His use of stark contrasts between light and dark, also known as chiaroscuro, heightened the vividness and sense of realism in his paintings.
Above all, he liked beheadings. Judith Beheading Holofernes, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, David with the Head of Goliath, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (not a typo). The squeamish should be made aware of the squirting blood, ghastly executions, and heads on platters before touring a Caravaggio exhibit. He ran up a higher body count than Pennywise, in art and in real life. After killing Ranuccio Tommasoni in a fight, he had to skip town in order to avoid losing his own head. Once he got his bearings in Naples, he established himself as one of the best Italian painters in the world before his early death in 1610 at the age of 38.
There are several other painters who incorporated elements of horror into their art. However, Goya’s work was not limited to the theme of eternal damnation (Bosch) or violence and gore (Caravaggio). His paintings have something for all horror enthusiasts to enjoy: cannibalism, the occult, body horror, demons, insanity, violence, torture, death, silent horror, famine, gothic horror, mauled corpses, isolation, cosmic horror. He was a regular Stephen King with a canvas.
Before the outbreak of the War of the Pyrenees in 1793, Goya had worked as a court painter for Spanish royalty. His artistic output consisted mostly of portraits of Charles III and Charles IV, tapestry cartoons, and religious paintings. However, the war brought about several changes in his life and art. He began to struggle with deafness and mental illness mere weeks after the start of hostilities. More importantly, he transitioned from producing works as a portraitist to exploring his increasingly pessimistic and darkened view of humanity.
In 1794, he completed his first horror masterpiece, Yard with Lunatics. It was inspired by his experiences at asylums in Zaragoza. Such dumping grounds for the mentally ill were common back then. In the painting, high stone walls surround the inmates. Two of them fight naked. Others grin idiotically and huddle on the ground. A single warden keeps guard. Darkness bathes the scene. The painting is devoid of light and human reason, much like the war that engulfed Spain from 1793 to 1795 and left 30,000-45,000 dead.
Unfortunately, greater bloodshed was to come in the Peninsular War. After Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain in 1808, his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, seized power. This war would drag on for six brutal years and leave almost a million dead. During this time, Goya would produce some of his darkest works.
His set of prints known as The Disasters of War was created between 1810 and 1820. The original title written on the collection of proofs reads: Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte, and Other Emphatic Caprices. Due to the political environment in which Goya lived, the prints were published 35 years after his death. They were divided into three sets: war, famine, and Bourbons/clergy.
Plates 1 through 47 deal with the fighting itself. The gritty black-and-white etchings depict mutilated corpses, sexual assault, mourners, executed prisoners of war. Where Goya departs from the work of earlier Spanish artists is his rejection of heroic dignity. There are no heroes to celebrate in these prints. Goya refuses to identify particular individuals or attribute blame to one side or the other. Rather, he focuses purely on the effects of the fighting. Unlike the War of the Pyrenees, the Peninsular War was total. Civilians died en masse. Torture, rape, looting, and executions of prisoners were committed by both sides. Even though it must have been a tragedy for Goya to lose all but one of his children in infancy, they never had to live through the horrors of war like their father.
Plates 48 to 64 are devoted to the famine that ran roughshod in Madrid from August 1811 through August 1812. During those twelve months, 20,000 people starved to death in that city alone. Again, Goya does not point fingers, but illustrates the suffering of the Spanish populace. His etchings portray bodies wrapped in blankets awaiting burial, lifeless women shuffling around in darkness, mourning children without their parents, cartloads of corpses being unloaded at a cemetery. While there’s no evidence to suggest that Goya lost any close friends or family, the famine affected him in a different way. A materials shortage meant that he had to use damaged plates or reuse ones that had already been printed on.
Plates 65 to 82 were named “emphatic caprices.” Etched from 1813 through 1820, they are a stark example of weird horror. Plate 75 (Troupe of charlatans) depicts a priest with the head of a bird performing in front of a herd of animals. Plate 66 (Strange devotion) shows a crowd of onlookers bowing before a donkey balancing a glass box with a corpse inside it. In Plate 67 (This is no less curious), a statue of the Virgin Mary is carried on the backs of two clergymen. Due to their condemnation of the Bourbons and clergy, it’s easy to understand why the prints were published decades after Goya’s death.
Even after the conclusion of the Peninsular War and Napoleon’s ouster in 1815, the political environment did not improve for Goya. The restored Bourbon rulers rejected the Spanish Constitution of 1812, a blow to liberals like himself. Also, the terror of the Spanish Inquisition would not end until after his death. Since its establishment in 1478, forced conversions to Catholicism, executions, and torture were approved judicial practices. Not the best conditions for artistic expression.
In the final years of his life, Goya lived in self-imposed exile on the outskirts of Madrid. Coincidentally, his farmhouse had acquired the name The House of the Deaf Man since it had belonged to another deaf man prior to him. At 75 years of age, he lived alone after the death of his wife Josefa in 1812 and was in declining physical and mental condition. This bleak period culminated with the Black Paintings, a collection of fourteen pieces that Goya, in true horror fashion, painted directly onto the walls of his house. He named none of the works, never spoke or wrote about them, and never intended them to be premiered. The titles that have been attributed to them were utilized by art historians.
Saturn Devouring His Son is believed to depict a Greek myth in which the Titan Cronus devoured his children for fear that one of them would overthrow him. In the painting, a giant humanoid figure bites into the left arm of a human body. The head and right arm have already been eaten. Blood drips from the giant’s mouth. His knuckles turn white from gripping the victim’s back. The bulging eyes and gaping mouth make the giant appear manic and insane. More so than any other of the Black Paintings, this artwork captures a mood of utter chaos and depravity.
Witches’ Sabbath does without the violence and gore. Instead, it is an example of a supernatural horror painting. Satan, in goat form, presides over a coven of aged witches under the light of the moon. All of the women have brutish faces contorted with fear and awe. Given the fact that witch trials were carried out during the Spanish Inquisition, many art historians view the painting as a satire.
Fight with Cudgels depicts two men swinging at each other with cudgels. Both pairs of feet seem to disappear into deep mud. Blood covers the face of one of the fighters. Some possible interpretations reference Spain’s internal political battles, the senselessness of human conflict given that the fighters’ legs are trapped in the mud, insanity and irrationality, etc.
After Goya completed the Black Paintings, he abandoned Spain and retired in Bordeaux with his younger maid and alleged lover, Leocadia Weiss. Four years later, he died of a stroke and was buried on April 16, 1828 at the age of 82. By then, his legacy as a Romantic painter had already been established, even before the publication of The Disasters of War in 1863 and the donation of the Black Paintings to the Museo del Prado in 1881.
Since his death two centuries ago, Goya has influenced other artists like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, composers like Enrique Granados, writers like Fernando Arrabal and Andrei Voznesensky. Documentaries have explored his genius, madness, artworks, personal relationships. Throngs of art enthusiasts have queued to see his works at museums. But more than that, he was the first painter to utilize the medium to portray horror in all its manifestations. He gave a voice to the primal fears and tragedies—death, violence, physical decay, illness—that all humans experience. It is for this reason that his darker works have resonated with the public and have won him immortality as a quintessential Romantic painter.
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