Maybe what makes this artist's figure so compelling is what he represents in terms of rupture — both with painting and with the society in which he lived, becoming the eternally dissatisfied man, almost a tormented and cursed being in the final days of his life.
The fact that his work unfolded between the Old Regime and the New Regime elevates it to an important historical document within a crucial era for the history of our country. He shows us many Spains: the happy world of Carlos IV, the imminent decline of the Old Regime, the War of Independence against the French, alongside the great Spanish tragedy and its division into two worlds.
An example of all this are the famous Disasters of War, in which Goya hurls a cry against every form of war or torture, ending the series with the diptych of The Charge of the Mamelukes and The Third of May 1808, in which he boldly narrates the direct confrontation while turning the viewer into an active participant in these harsh episodes. With such works he denounces cruelty, horror and barbarism — far from the heroic and grandiloquent treatment of history painting of other eras up to that point. He uses his work the way a photojournalist uses the lens of his camera: to denounce atrocities. He captures things as they are, without embellishments or flattery — something that wasn't common at the time and that clashed considerably within Spanish aesthetics. Normally, until the 19th century, the victors were depicted but never the defeated on a front page.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes is clearly ahead of his time, and not only in his subject matter but also in his technique: thick, freely-stroked brushwork and chromatic intensity, which fill all his late works with expressiveness and fascinating freedom. People sometimes even say that the Black Paintings he made on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo are precursors of what would come a century later with the Expressionism of the Avant-gardes.
So let's think about how a single man — sensitive to the experiences he had lived through his life, ill, alone and with a great vision of justice — managed to flip everything on its head and challenge the established laws of academic painting up to that point, something no one had ever done before.