Goya’s black paintings
Atropos or The Fates , Francisco Goya
The Christian tradition is different. Rather than man at the mercy of childish gods, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect, so all suffering is the fault of man. The Christian epic Paradise Lost by John Milton tells the story of genesis, and suggests that man, not God, is imperfect and responsible for their own downfall because they have eaten from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil. Goya was witness to many atrocities; much of which he used as a study for his series of prints The Disasters of War . 1 These prints depict horrors such as beheadings, hangings and dismembered men tied to trees. Spain was a hard place to be during the Peninsular war, and seeing these barbarisms first hand must certainly lead one to question God’s omnibenevolence, yet from a Christian point of view this questioning of God, a being by definition perfect, renders man imperfect in turn. It is the original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil that makes us flawed, as it allows us to question God. Artists and thinkers like Milton and Goya are too intelligent and inquisitive not to ‘eat from the tree’, making them ‘imperfect’ Christians.
Los desastres de la Guerra , plate No.39, Francisco Goya
1 Veja 1994: 3.
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