Francisco Goya Y Lucientes.
Artist, in whose art the progressive ideas of Romanticism were perhaps the earliest expressed, was the Spaniard FRANCISCO GOYA Y LUCIENTES (1746—1828). For a year 1789, appointed court artist to King Charles IV, Goya creates portraits of the royal family, in which he presents his principals in an almost caricatured manner, bringing out features of ugliness and thoughtlessness in their features, as if in this way he wanted to express his conviction about the crumbling foundations of the monarchy. Soon after, his series of prints entitled Caprices brings in compositions close to feverish hallucinations a sharp critique of social relations in feudal Spain, ruled by the Inquisition, which eradicated all manifestations of progressive thought. Goya's greatest painting works are related to the aggression of Napoleon I's army against Spain. Commemorating one of the dramatic moments of. 1808 is painted six years later The execution of the Madrid insurgents.
Compositionally, the picture is divided into two parts: on the right, a firing squad shrouded in darkness, one second before the salvo, with his attitude learned during the drill, he symbolizes the cold mechanism of crime. This rhythmic group is contrasted by Goya with a group of insurgents swirling in blinding light, whose gestures express everything: determination, despair and hatred of the invader. Although compositionally both groups are connected by the figure of a man in the middle, desperately waiting for the execution of the sentence, the main figure of the painting is an insurgent in a white shirt with his arms raised, in which the artist concentrated the entire ideological expression of the work.
Contemporaneity of the subject, the drama of the situation expressed in gestures and facial expressions, highly concentrated chiaroscuro, expressive color - all this connects Goya's work with the art of Romanticism, at the same time opening the way for future great compositions by Delacroix and Daumier.
In addition to the words depicting the tragic events for Spain from the period of the invasion of the French army, Goya's work is also a wonderful series of engravings entitled The Horrors of War.