The Demons Within and the Demons Without
Both Francisco de Goya’s The Third of May 1808, 1814, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream, 1893, showcase the horror of the human condition but take different directions to convey this message. Goya uses the outside world, in this case, the French army, to illustrate man’s inhumanity to man, while Munch uses internal torment to portray the mind’s inhumanity to man.
Goya’s Third of May 1808 depicts a long row of Spanish rebels lined up to face a French execution squad. The scene is set in the early morning hours after the French occupation of Madrid. Goya’s canvas centerpiece is the two groups of men — the French soldiers, a solid and composed firing squad, and the Spanish rebels, a cluttered group of captives held at gunpoint.
Goya contrasts the dark and relentless line of the executioners’ rifles with the collapsing asymmetry of their victims as they confront each other. He intensifies the emotion by bathing the scene in nighttime darkness, broken by the square lantern in front of the soldiers, which illuminates the Spanish victims to the left, including a monk in prayer. The leading figure is brightly lit, kneeling among the blood-stained bodies of those already shot, his arms spread wide, pleading for the French army to stop. The outstretched arms are a clear reference to Christ on the cross, outlining the victim’s humanity in contrast to the faceless and anonymous executioners on the right, dark in the shadow of their mechanical inhumanity and callousness.
By contrast, in Munch’s The Scream, the horror comes from within. Just like with Goya, the brushstrokes, composition, lighting, and figures are meant to elicit a strong response from the spectator.
In an 1892 diary entry, Munch writes how an evening walk along a fjord suddenly turned into a terrifying vision, the clouds blood red, a scream passing through nature. Painted a year later, The Scream is set on the roadside on top of Ekeberg Hill, facing neighboring Oslo. The screaming central figure with an agonized face stands on a bridge that extends at a steep angle in a landscape of a lake, fjord, and hills. The deep red, orange, yellow, and blue tones of the line-distorted sky seem to echo the figure’s inner torment.
The diary clearly indicates that the scene is autobiographical. During this time, Munch was mentally troubled and dealing with mental illness; and the way he could describe his experience was by painting. But it is also universal, with the excruciating scream symbolizing the anxiety of the human condition.
As with Goya, Munch uses the central figure to express his own and universal feelings of fear and hopelessness. The two figures in the background parallel the French executioners in their seeming callousness and indifference to the agony of the main figure. Munch brilliantly creates a simple work of art into a complex portrayal of his own and the world’s mental state, using minimum detail to achieve a profoundly expressionistic work.
Goya’s Third of May 1808 and Munch’s The Scream brilliantly illustrate the opposite way the artists present their own emotions. Goya, distraught by the slaughter of his countrymen, showcases the French’s atrocities. An anxiety-ridden Munch feels the cry of nature pierce through his mind. Both artists intricately convey the brutality of the outer and inner worlds, with their figures as powerful stand-ins for their own emotions.
