The Third of May 1808

The Third of May 1808 in Madrid (El 3 de mayo en Madrid, also known as Los fusilamientos del tres de mayo) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Francisco Goya, finished in 1814 and held in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

On 2 May 1808 the people of Madrid rose against Napoleon's occupying troops after learning that the last members of the royal family were to be taken to France. Before dawn the next day the French rounded up hundreds of Spaniards and shot them at several places around the city, including the hill of Príncipe Pío. In February 1814, with the French finally expelled, Goya asked the provisional government to let him record with his brush the most heroic actions of the uprising. The result was this canvas and its companion of the same size, The Second of May 1808, also called The Charge of the Mamelukes. It is not known whether Goya saw either day's events himself; as court painter he had sworn loyalty to Joseph Bonaparte.

A firing squad, seen almost from behind, forms a solid wall of shakos and rifles at the right. Facing it across a narrow space is a disordered group of captives, lit by a square lantern on the ground. The central man, in a white shirt and yellow trousers, flings up his arms in a pose often compared to the crucified Christ, with stigmata-like marks on his right hand; a monk prays near him and a bloodied corpse lies in the foreground. The colours are held to earth tones and black, broken by white and red. Popular prints were likely sources, among them Miguel Gamborino's 1813 print of five murdered monks from Valencia.

No record survives of the picture's first display. In the 1850s the Prado's director José de Madrazo doubted it was by Goya, and it entered the museum's published catalogue only in 1872. During the Civil War it was damaged in a road accident in 1937 on the way to Valencia, and was restored in 1938, 1939, 1941 and 2008. Kenneth Clark called it the first great picture revolutionary in style, subject and intention; Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian and Picasso's Guernica and Massacre in Korea all draw on it. The canvas measures 268 × 347 cm.