The ideas of the Enlightenment (first of all the French, with the most famous of its representatives – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu and François-Marie Arouet Voltaire) not only influenced the political sphere of the Eighteenth century but also art. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was directly convinced by these ideas: he took a passive part in the Napoleonic wars and was a friend of the prominent representatives of the Spanish Enlightenment. The study aims at analyzing interactions between text and image in the series of etchings of F. Goya “The Disasters of War” and the reception of the idea of «common good» in the etching 71 “Against the common good”. We have chosen several theoretical and methodological tools to deal with narrative and visual sources. Hermeneutics and semiotics belong to the specific methods used in the process of analysis of engravings. Comprehensive approach is determined by the usage of F. Goya both extraverbial and verbal (double numbers of etchings and artionims, ekfrasis) means. The methodological basis of the study is made up wit the principles of complexity, historicism and scientific character. The main methods were iconographic and iconological; empirical, prosopographical, method of synthetic and analytical source criticism; comparative-historical analysis. Probably, Francisco Goya, who also criticized the contemporary obscurantism in Spain (which is especially reflected in the series of etchings “Los Caprichos”), turned to the ideas of the French enlightenment, which gave rise to possibly unconscious reminiscences and allusions in his work. Thus, we are interested mainly how Goya indirectly or even unconsciously borrowed ideas from the Enlightenment movement, which spread rapidly all over Europe. In this case studying direct borrowings from J.-J. Rousseau’s ideas played only minor role.
Idea of common good (el bien general) in the series of etchings “The Disasters of War” (“Los Desastres de la Guerra”) by Francisco Goya (based on the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Art funds)
