Madrid, 2 May 1808: a popular uprising broke out against Napoleon's occupying army. In reprisal the following day, French troops rounded up civilians on the hill of Príncipe Pío and shot them in front of a firing squad. Goya did not witness the event that night; he painted it six years later, in 1814, after the Bonapartists had withdrawn from Spain.

At the centre of the composition is a man in a white shirt, arms raised. His face is fully lit; the faces of the firing squad are not shown — they remain a mechanical, anonymous group. The posture echoes Christ's arms on the cross, and there is a wound visible on his right palm. Goya uses the theological reference but does not heroise: this man is not a commander, not a saint, not a national hero; he is a Spaniard whose name we do not know.

The painting breaks from tradition on every count. Classical war composition would have centred victory, military virtue, the noble gesture. Goya refuses all of this. A bloody heap of the already-killed lies on the ground; some of those about to be shot cover their faces with their hands, one clenches his fist, one prays. The palette is dark, almost monochrome; only the white shirt and the bloody ground stand out. In the background the silhouette of Madrid sits like an empty stage flat.

*The Third of May 1808* was not publicly exhibited for a long time — through most of the nineteenth century the Spanish monarchy kept it in the storerooms of the Prado. When finally opened to the public in 1872 it had a decisive effect on a young Manet and, later, on Picasso, whose *Guernica* (1937) is the direct structural heir of this composition. The painting is now widely cited as the first moment war was painted without being heroised.