The Disasters of War

This print is plate 10, Tampoco (Nor These), from The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra), Francisco Goya's series of 82 prints made between 1810 and 1820; the plate itself is dated about 1810 to 1815 and is etched with burin work.

Goya started the series at the age of 62, already in poor health and almost deaf, while keeping his post as first court painter through the French occupation. He never explained the prints, which are read as a protest against the violence of the 1808 uprising, the war that followed, and the reaction after the Bourbon restoration of 1814. His own title, written on an album of proofs he gave his friend Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, now in the British Museum, was Fatal Consequences of Spain's Bloody War with Bonaparte, and Other Emphatic Caprices. The first 47 plates show incidents of the war, plates 48 to 64 the Madrid famine of 1811–12, and the rest the disappointment of the liberals after 1814.

In Tampoco, French soldiers seize women outdoors at night and try to rape them; the bodies twist into a single mass in which individuals are hard to tell apart. Goya covered the background and the men's clothes with close parallel etched lines but left the women in white, perhaps to suggest their innocence, and placed in front a woman wrenched into a painful pose by a soldier. The caption only makes sense in sequence: it follows plate 9, No quieren (They Do Not Want To), and is followed by plate 11, Ni por esas (Not Even So), so that the three titles form a continuous statement about violence against women.

The prints stayed unpublished in Goya's lifetime. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando issued the first edition in 1863, 35 years after his death, engraving each title from the Ceán album; plate 10's copper plate, 149 × 216 mm, is kept in the Calcografía Nacional in Madrid. A later plate, number 36, carries the same caption, Tampoco.