Cartloads to the cemetery, plate 64 from The Disasters of War

The prints in Goya’s Disasters of War, one of the artist’s bleakest series, protest the treatment of civilians during the long Spanish conflict with France, particularly demonstrating the toll on women. The unceremonious manhandling of a female casualty of war makes a troubling focal point for this particularly dark image. The anonymous woman’s dangling white limbs and displaced skirts suggest she may have suffered rape in addition to the other acts of violence that caused her death.