# Plate 69 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): "Nothing. It will say so" (Nada. Ello dira) > Francisco de Goya y Lucientes - Etched c. 1814-1815; plate first published 1863 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/francisco-goya/goya-desastres-plate-69-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-18 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Francisco de Goya y Lucientes - **Date:** Etched c. 1814-1815; plate first published 1863 - **Medium:** Etching, burnished aquatint, lavis, drypoint and burin - **Dimensions:** Plate: 15.3 x 19.9 cm (6 x 7 13/16 in.); Sheet: 25.2 x 34.5 cm (9 15/16 x 13 9/16 in.) - **Object type:** Print - **Period:** Spanish, early nineteenth century - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Department of Drawings and Prints) - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A corpse rises just far enough to write a single word, "Nada", and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando engraved it, in 1863, as a promise: "Nothing. It will say so." Goya's own handwritten caption, on the one complete set of proofs he gave a friend in his lifetime, says something narrower and more finished: "Nothing. That is what it says." The difference between those two tenses is documented, not invented, and this plate, the sixty-ninth of eighty etched during and after the Peninsular War and withheld from publication until thirty-five years after Goya's death, is one of the places scholars point to it.This impression entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1922, bought with funds from the estate of the banker Jacob H. Schiff, two years after his death. It is a separate, later printed sheet, not the artist's own proof, and the strongest evidence available ties it to the Academy's first, 1863 edition only by way of a companion plate from the same purchase lot, not by a catalogue number recorded for this plate itself.Read against the plate immediately before it and the plate that closes the series, plate 69 sits at the hinge between the Disasters' documentary plates and its final, allegorical argument about what survived the war. Goya gave that argument a single unresolved word, and the record here holds the two forms its caption has taken and the scholarship built on the difference, rather than fold them into one. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1814-1815** Francisco de Goya (the artist) `[documented]` (creation) Plate etched, aquatinted and worked in drypoint and burin by Goya as part of the larger, unpublished series later known as Los Desastres de la Guerra. - **c. 1820-1828** Goya, then his estate `[documented]` (retained unpublished; one proof set given away) Goya gave a complete set of proofs of the series, with his own handwritten titles including his caption for this plate, to his friend Juan Agustin Cean Bermudez. He kept the copperplates themselves and never published from them. He died in Bordeaux in 1828 with the series still unpublished. - **1828-1862** Javier Goya (the artist's son), then unclear custody `[unknown]` (inheritance and gap) The 80 copperplates passed to Goya's son, Javier. The exact custody of the plates between Javier Goya's death, usually dated to 1854, and the Real Academia's documented 1862 acquisition is not detailed in the sources consulted; this interval is recorded as a gap. - **1862-1863** Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid `[documented]` (acquisition of the copperplates and first publication) The Academy acquired the 80 surviving copperplates in 1862 and published the first edition, of about 500 sets, in 1863, thirty-five years after Goya's death. - **1863-1922** unknown intermediate owner(s) `[unknown]` (gap) How this specific sheet moved from a Real Academia printing into the market that supplied the Metropolitan Museum in 1922 is not documented in the Museum's own record or in the other sources consulted for this record. - **1922-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (purchase) Purchased in 1922 using funds from the bequest of the banker and philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff, who died in 1920. The dealer or auction house that supplied the sheet, if any, is not named in the Museum's own online catalogue record. ## Open questions - From whom did the Met purchase this sheet in 1922? The Museum's own catalogue record names only the funding source, the Jacob H. Schiff bequest, and no dealer or auction house. - Is this specific sheet a true first-edition (1863) pull, or from one of the four later Real Academia re-editions (1892, 1903, 1906, 1937)? The first-edition attribution here rests on a sibling sheet from the same accession lot, not on a Harris catalogue number recorded for plate 69 itself. - The Met catalogues the accompanying title-page sheet for this set (object 851888) as an offset lithograph, a commercial printing process that postdates 1863 by decades. Whether that particular leaf is a later replacement bound into an otherwise first-edition set is not addressed in the Museum's own record. - What did Goya intend by "Nada"? Valeriano Bozal reads it as the culmination of an anti-clerical critique running through plates 66 to 69; other accounts read it more broadly as a verdict on the political aftermath of the war. No consensus in the sources consulted resolves which, if either, is closer to Goya's own intention. - What was the exact custody of the 80 copperplates between Javier Goya's death, usually dated to 1854, and the Real Academia's documented 1862 acquisition of them? The sources consulted do not detail this interval. - Does any other first-state proof of plate 69, showing the brighter, undarkened allegorical figure of Justice recorded in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston impression, survive elsewhere? ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record and Open Access API, Plate 69 from "The Disasters of War": "Nothing. The event will tell" (Nada. Ello dira), accession 22.60.25(69), object 381410. Confirms medium, dimensions, credit line, and isPublicDomain: true. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record, Plate 66 from "The Disasters of War": "Strange devotion!", accession 22.60.25(66), object 381417. - [3] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record, Plate 68 from "The Disasters of War": "What madness!", accession 22.60.25(68), object 381415. - [4] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record, title page and letterpress description to "The Disasters of War", accession 22.60.25, object 851888. - [5] Wikipedia, "The Disasters of War", for the publication history, the Cean Bermudez album, the three-part structure of the series, the caprichos enfaticos, and the title change on plate 69 and the comparable change on plate 36. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with Tomas Harris's catalogue raisonne or a peer-reviewed monograph. - [6] Wikipedia, "Francisco Goya", for the artist's biography: birth and death, court career, deafness, the Peninsular War, the Black Paintings and the Bordeaux exile. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography. - [7] Wikipedia, "Jacob Schiff", for Schiff's dates, career and philanthropy, including support for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the Museum's own donor records or a Schiff biography. - [8] Fundacion Goya en Aragon, catalogue entry for "Nada. Ello dira", plate 69 of Los Desastres de la Guerra, for the title history (Goya's manuscript caption versus the 1863 engraved caption) and interpretive discussion. - [9] Art Institute of Chicago, catalogue entry, "Nothing. The Event Will Tell, plate 69 from The Disasters of War", for the composition description, the title-change note, and the scholarly readings attributed to Nigel Glendinning and Valeriano Bozal. - [10] Yale University Art Gallery, catalogue entry, "Nada. [Ello dira] (Nothing. The Event Will Tell)", plate 69, Arthur Ross Collection, for confirmation of the 1st-edition designation used by other institutions and the medium and dimensions of a comparable impression. - [11] Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, "Goya's Disasters of War", in-depth collection essay, for the Real Academia's 1862 acquisition of the copperplates, the 1863 first edition of about 500 sets, and the series' three-part structure. - [12] Wikimedia Commons, file record for "Plate 69 from 'The Disasters of War' (Los Desastres de la Guerra)- 'Nothing. The event will tell.' (Nada. Ello dira) MET DP817471.jpg", confirming CC0 licence via extmetadata.LicenseShortName, donated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.