Plate 69 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): "Nothing. It will say so" (Nada. Ello dira)

A corpse, half risen from the ground and already decomposing, props itself up on one arm and writes a single word, "Nada" (Nothing), on a sheet of paper. Behind it, figures with mask-like, indistinct faces emerge from darkness. At the left edge, in the final printed state, a female figure can just be made out holding a set of scales, an attribute of Justice, largely swallowed by the surrounding black aquatint.

The sheet is small, a plate of only 15.3 by 19.9 centimetres on a sheet of 25.2 by 34.5 centimetres, consistent with the other 79 plates of the series: an object made to be looked at closely, one print at a time, not displayed at a distance.

The Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue record lists the technique as etching, burnished aquatint, lavis, drypoint and burin, the same combination Goya used across most of the Desastres plates in their final stage of work. Aquatint gives the broad tonal darkness that swallows the background figures; burnishing lets Goya selectively lighten small areas within that darkness, such as the paper the corpse is writing on; drypoint and burin add the sharper linear work in the foreground figure. It is a printmaking technique built for exactly the kind of image this is: a small patch of legible information isolated inside an otherwise engulfing dark.

Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 and the uprising and reprisals of the Dos de Mayo touched off the Peninsular War, which Goya lived through as a salaried court painter in a country under occupation. He began etching the plates that became Los Desastres de la Guerra around 1810 and continued working on them, on the evidence of the plates themselves, until close to 1820, well after the war's end in 1814.

He never published them. He died in Bordeaux in 1828, in self-imposed exile from Ferdinand VII's restored absolutist monarchy, with the 80 finished plates still unpublished. His own manuscript title for the complete album of proofs he assembled reads: "Fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices." The plates now grouped as the caprichos enfaticos, including this one, take that second half of the title directly from Goya's own hand.

Los Desastres de la Guerra falls into three parts. Plates 1 to 47 record combat and its atrocities: executions, mutilation, rape, reprisal, without consistently assigning blame to either the French or the Spanish side. Plates 48 to 64 record the famine that struck Madrid from August 1811 until the city's liberation by Wellington's forces in August 1812, a famine caused in part by French requisitioning and in part by Spanish guerrilla and bandit activity blocking supply roads into the capital, and that killed an estimated 20,000 people in the city in a single year.

Plate 69 belongs to neither of those groups. It falls in the final section, plates 65 to 82, usually called the caprichos enfaticos, or emphatic caprices, where the series stops documenting specific events and turns allegorical.

The war's end in 1814 did not end what Goya had to say. Ferdinand VII's restoration brought back absolutist government and the apparatus of the Inquisition, and the final eighteen plates of the Desastres turn their attention there: judicial torture, the clergy, and the political and religious currents of the restored Old Regime, rendered through masked, animal and fable-like imagery rather than reportage. Plate 66, "Strange devotion!", and plate 68, "What madness!", both from this same closing sequence, mock the ceremonial handling of church statuary and devotional practice; plate 69 follows immediately after them.

The plate carries two documented captions, and they are not the same sentence. On the album of proofs Goya gave in his lifetime to his friend Juan Agustin Cean Bermudez, now in the British Museum, Goya's own handwritten title for this plate is in the present tense: "Nada. Ello lo dice", roughly "Nothing. That is what it says." The engraved caption on the plate as published by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1863 is in the future tense: "Nada. Ello dira", "Nothing. It will say so" or "Nothing. The event will tell."

According to the Fundacion Goya en Aragon's catalogue entry for this plate and the Art Institute of Chicago's own catalogue note, the change from present to future tense is documented by comparing the Cean Bermudez album against the 1863 engraved edition, and it is one of at least two such title changes made between Goya's manuscript captions and the Academy's published text; a comparable change is recorded elsewhere in the series, where plate 36's caption moved from "Tan poco" to "Tampoco". Neither source consulted here assigns a motive to the Academy for the change, and this record does not supply one either. The Met's own catalogued title for this sheet, "Nothing. The event will tell", reflects the 1863 engraved wording, not Goya's manuscript one.

The image's meaning is argued, not settled. The art historian Valeriano Bozal reads plate 69 as the culmination of the anti-clerical sequence running through plates 66 to 68, on the view that the corpse's "Nada" answers, and rejects, a promise of an afterlife that Bozal takes the preceding plates to be mocking. The Hispanist Nigel Glendinning connects the composition instead to the Baroque tradition of vanitas imagery, by way of Otto van Veen's Theatro Moral, and to the decomposing figures and justice scales in Juan de Valdes Leal's seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, a visual lineage that runs through Spanish religious art independent of any specific anti-clerical target.

A first-state proof of this plate, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, preserves an earlier stage of the composition in which the allegorical female figure at the left, holding the scales, is brightly lit rather than nearly erased by darkness as she appears in the final published state. Goya darkened her deliberately between states. Read against that change, the final print does not merely juxtapose the corpse's word with a dim figure of Justice; it shows Goya visually extinguishing her. That reading is argued from the physical evidence of the two states, not from resemblance alone, but it remains an argument, advanced by named scholars, and not a caption Goya himself is recorded as having given the image.

The 80 copperplates passed after Goya's death to his son, Javier Goya, and eventually to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, which acquired them in 1862 and published the first edition the following year, in a printing of about 500 sets. The Academy went on to reissue the plates at least four more times, in 1892, 1903, 1906 and 1937, and the plates wore measurably between printings; the 1892 edition is associated with steel-facing intended to slow further wear. Because the same 80 plates were reprinted across more than seventy years, an impression of plate 69 dated only to "1863" without specifying which pull it is can belong to any of five separate editions with visibly different tonal quality.

The Met's own catalogue record for this sheet does not state which of the five editions it belongs to. The strongest available evidence points to the first, 1863 edition: the companion sheet from plate 66, held under the same accession lot and acquired in the same 1922 purchase, is catalogued elsewhere with the Tomas Harris catalogue-raisonne number 186.III.1 and described as a first-edition impression. That is evidence about a sibling sheet from the same lot, not a Harris number recorded for plate 69 itself, and this record treats the first-edition attribution for this specific sheet as inferred rather than confirmed.

The Cean Bermudez album, the object that carries Goya's own handwritten caption for this plate, is a different physical object from the sheet described in this record. That album is a single, complete set of proofs that Goya gave to a friend in his own lifetime; it also contains two compositions, numbered 81 and 82, that were never included in the 1863 published edition and were not recovered and added to the Academy's set until 1870. It has been in the British Museum since the twentieth century, by way of the dealer and collector Tomas Harris's collection. This Met sheet is a separate, later, printed impression pulled from the Academy's own copperplate and published edition, not Goya's proof.

The Met acquired this sheet, along with the rest of its 22.60.25 set, in 1922, using funds from the bequest of Jacob H. Schiff, the German-born New York banker and head of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, who died in 1920 and who had supported the Museum during his lifetime as well. Neither the Met's own online catalogue record nor the other sources consulted for this record name the dealer, auction house or individual from whom the Museum purchased the set in 1922.