The Disasters of War (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
The Disasters of War (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Details
From the Back Cover The strikingly original characterizations and sharply drawn scenes that came to be known posthumously as Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) are among Francisco Goya's most powerful works and one of the masterpieces of Western civilization. Goya's model for his visual indictment of war and its horrors was the Spanish insurrection of 1808 and the resulting Peninsular War with Napoleonic France. The bloody conflict and the horrible famine of Madrid were witnessed by Goya himself, or were revealed to him from the accounts of friends and contemporaries. From 1810 to 1820, he worked to immortalize them in a series of etchings.The artist himself never saw the results. The etchings were not published until 1863, some 35 years after his death. By then, the passions of the Napoleonic era had subsided and the satirical implications in Goya's work were less likely to offend. The Dover edition reproduces in its original size the second state of this first edition, which contained 80 prints. Three additional prints not in the 1863 edition are also included here, making this the most complete collection possible of the etchings Goya intended for this series. The bitter, biting captions are reprinted, along with the new English translations, as are the original title page and preface.Dover unabridged republication of the first (1863) edition with three additional prints reprinted from proofs in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Read more
Reviews
The images cheaply reprinted in this edition of Goya's Disasters of War are poorly rendered. They are muddied, unclear and indistinct, stripping away Goya's incredibly sure handed technique and voiding the emotionally violent impact these images must have had when they were first viewed many centuries ago. These images demand better respect, and some of them receive it by means of a duotone process in a wonderful book entitled "Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment." If you want a clear and precise idea as to why Goya's Disasters of War were a great artistic and technical achievement the Dover edition will not deliver the goods. If you have never seen a fine reprinting of these images, then by all means purchase the Dover edition - ignorance is bliss.
