Disparate Cruel

This print is part of Goya’s final and most enigmatic print series, Los Disparates, created when he was over 70 years old. Commonly translated as The Follies in English, this title does little to capture the mystery conveyed by the Spanish word disparate, which connotes something absurd, foolish, impossible, and irrational.

In this image, a ferocious man straddles another and uses a bullfighter’s lance to brutally spear his skull. His victim cries out in anguish, but the witnesses to this unconscionable violence either look on with disinterested detachment or turn away, skulking into the shadowy ruins behind them.

Produced in the wake of the French occupation of Spain and under the absolutist rule of King Ferdinand VII (reigned 1808, 1813–1833), this print might be read in relation to the violence and trauma of the war or to Ferdinand’s repressive regime. However, it is also possible to see it as a more universal critique of a willfully blind society—or, perhaps even worse, a society in which violence and cruelty are accepted with complacency and indifference.