Truth has died, plate 79 from The Disasters of War
1815/20, published 1863
Medium
Etching and burnishing on ivory wove paper with gilt edges
Dimensions
Image: 14.5 × 18.2 cm (5 3/4 × 7 3/16 in.); Plate: 17 × 21.5 cm (6 3/4 × 8 1/2 in.); Sheet: 24 × 33.5 cm (9 1/2 × 13 1/4 in.)
Classification
etching
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
124932
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Though not the last plate of the series, this print finalizes its central themes in a profound manner, claiming that truth itself is dead. Here, personified by a shining corpse about to be buried, truth connotes constitutional liberty. Justice is featured at the right, clasping her scales in her left hand. She covers her face, perhaps weeping, as if she cannot bear the scene before her. By ending the series on this note of despair, Francisco de Goya brought an answer to the question of what must...
About the Artist
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes · 1746–1828
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, in the small Aragonese village of Fuendetodos, Spain, to José Benito de Goya, a master gilder, and Gracia de Lucientes. The fourth of six children in a modest lower-middle-class family, Goya received a basic education before beginning his artistic training at age 14 under the local painter José Luzán y Martínez in Zaragoza, where he sp...