Politics and the visual arts make reluctant bedfellows. People would much rather curl up with a novel by, say, Ayn Rand or George Orwell than peruse a stack of satirical prints by William Hogarth. Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Byron wrote timeless poetry about the politics of their own times, and they’re hardly the only ones. Among moderns, Dylan Thomas exposed the callousness of diplomacy in his famous poem “The Hand that Signed a Paper Felled a City.” It seems as if the intrigues and contradictions of politicians unfold themselves more vividly on the sprawling canvas of literature than tacked and framed on an artist’s easel.

History’s great political paintings can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Francisco de Goya’s “Third of May, 1808” is on everyone’s list. The painting shows with unforgettable poignancy the mass executions in Madrid following the failed uprising against the French invaders on the previous day. May 2 is still commemorated in Madrid as a patriotic holiday. In 1814, after the French were expelled from Spain, Goya appealed for the commission to paint these events in two large companion pieces, both today in the Prado Museum. The “Second of May, 1808” represents the furious, futile struggle of the crudely armed Spanish insurgents against the Mamelukes, the superbly trained Egyptian mercenaries of Napoleon’s mounted Imperial Guard. That night, and continuing into the night of the 3rd, 5,000 Madrileños were rounded up, denied trial and summarily cut down by a new invention of military justice, the firing squad. A silent city trembled with fear as the angry crackle of the killing squad echoed through the streets hour after hour as if the massacre would never end.

When Goya completed “Third of May” in 1814, the invention of photography was still a quarter-century away. One of his etchings in the “Disasters of War” bears the title, “Yo lo vi” (“I saw it”), so we know he knew the concept of war reporting. Goya’s great painting makes no pretense of documentary evidence, and it is not even known if he witnessed the uprising of May 2 or the reprisals of the 3rd. Wise men stayed away in those days. Goya’s masterpiece came straight from the heart of an artist who could not get the agony of unspeakable horror out of his mind and who desperately wanted history not to repeat itself.

In the painting, crowds seem to stretch into the darkness of the night, though relatively few people are actually shown. The action is life-sized, converging in an unmistakable X-marks-the-spot and pushed way into the foreground as if the viewer, too, can smell the gunpowder and hear the cries, the prayers, the wailing of tears. Goya has massed his figures in four distinct groups—those already dead, those about to be shot, those waiting to be placed before the rifles and the firing squad itself. In the distance a lightless palace seems extinguished. A man looms larger than anyone else at the center of attention, even though he is on his knees. His skin is dark from working in the sun, an ordinary citizen, an everyman. Goya bathes him in white, the universal symbol of innocence, marking his place in history as the iconic representative of the 5,000 Spanish victims. His arms are raised in the V of helpless surrender. The V is repeated in the arms of the dead man bathed in blood in front of him. Any plea to our common humanity will not be heard; all is lost. As the critic Robert Hughes writes in his recent biography of Goya, “Most of the victims have faces. The killers do not. This is one of the most often-noted aspects of ‘Third of May,’ and rightly so: with this painting, the modern image of war as anonymous killing is born, and a long tradition of killing as ennobled spectacle comes to its overdue end.”

In her 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf wrote that the great novels always have characters through whom we see “all sorts of things” as if they were invisible: “There is hardly any subject of human experience that is left out of War and Peace.” Tolstoy’s novel follows the entanglement of personal lives caught up in the cataclysm of yet another Napoleonic invasion: Russia. Careless statesmen make politics in palaces, then—Tolstoy writes, Dylan Thomas writes, Goya paints—all hell breaks loose outside.  

Art&Antiques’ Florence correspondent John T. Spike is near completion of the first volume of his biography of Michelangelo.