On Days Like These

On days like these, when the caprice of a handful of men threatens to extinguish all life and all joy, I can only hope for lucid, human encounters like the one I had today, in a corner of an art gallery, with a print from Francisco Goya's series Los desastres de la guerra [The Disasters of War].

Two starving women lie on the ground, one near death while a third kneels by their side and offers a cup to the dying woman. — *Fig 1. "De qué sirve una taza?" ["What good is a cup?"], ca. 1810–20, on display at the Victoria Art Gallery.*

A reminder that we have no need for more Napoleons in this world, a desperate wail etched into metal and paper, an admonotion for all the lives needlessly lost to "caprichos enfáticos" ["emphatic caprices"], as Goya called it, and a testament to a shared sense of horror in the face of a relentless unleashing of war and violence that spans centuries. Goya's prints are as necessary and vital now as they were when he first crafted them as a witness.

- Andrea

P.S. The gallery's description of this piece mentions the deadly famine that Goya depicted in this print. However, it fails to mention that the famine was the result of the French army's siege on Madrid.