FRANCISCO DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES (Fuendetodos, Zaragoza, 1746 - Bordeaux, France, 1828).Los

FRANCISCO DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES (Fuendetodos, Zaragoza, 1746 - Bordeaux, France, 1828).
"Los desastres de la guerra" (79 etchings).
First edition. 1863. Published by the Real Academia de Nobles Artes de San Fernando. Madrid
Edition of 80 etchings on Guarro paper (79 etchings, copy number 47 is missing).
Numbered and titled copies in plate.
Hard cover.
Presents marks of use and deterioration due to the passage of time.
Size: 17,5 x 22 cm (print), 24 x 34 cm (paper), 25 x 37 x 6 cm (book).
Belonging to the book published by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando of the collection of prints, the first edition of "Los desastres de la guerra" (1923). This first edition appeared in 1863, and others followed in 1892, 1903 and 1906, this one being the most sought after and sought after.
Edition of prints in which Francisco de Goya reflected the horror unleashed during the War of Independence, which began in 1808. Enrique Lafuente Ferrari's contribution to the study of Goya's Disasters of War is considered fundamental. To him we owe the first attempt, with scientific criteria, to systematise the analysis of the Disasters, becoming an obligatory point of reference in subsequent studies.
"The Disasters of War", a work from the Aragonese painter's last period, have become over time a series of timeless prints that can be applied to any war in the world. Death, torture, hunger, disease, lack of solidarity... these are all disasters that are part of any war, showing the bitterest side of the human being. Goya began to engrave the plates around 1810, after returning from the front, and finished the series in 1815. "The Disasters" give free rein to one of the fundamental aesthetic categories of modernity: pathos. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Goya did not set up a systematic, serial chronicle of events, but transformed or eliminated the anecdotal in order to arrive at a universal vision.
They exemplify a world in crisis, understood in the sense of change. Conceptually, they reveal the fissures of a socio-political structure based on an impeded stratification of the strata, and of a system of values based on the immobilism of customs and the tyrannical religious oppression of consciences.
Aesthetically, they anticipate modern sensibility and the shift towards an art dominated by subjectivity and creative freedom. Biographically, the Caprichos appear in one of the most decisive decades in Goya's life and artistic production. This is why successive generations of writers, artists and intellectuals over the last two centuries have been unable to ignore its status as a symbol: a symbol of the end of the Ancien Régime, of the change in taste between Classicist and Romantic aesthetics, and of the crisis that occurred in the biography and art of a universal creator.
The historiography specialising in Goya has established a sequence of events supposedly determining the creation of the Caprichos. This sequence appears to be characterised by a progressive departure from normative art and a consequent approach to the domain of invention. This new conception of art is linked to the biographical episodes of the serious illness that left him deaf, his intimate relations with the Duchess of Alba and his ties of friendship with the circle of enlightened intellectuals. The conclusion is that Goya needed a series of satirical prints that would provide a multiple response to his inventive perception of art, his progressive isolation, his distrust of human beings and his social concerns rooted in the Enlightenment.