The strikingly original characterizations and sharply drawn scenes that came to be known posthumously as Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) are among Francisco Goya's most powerful works and one of the masterpieces of Western civilization. Goya's model for his visual indictment of war and its horrors was the Spanish insurrection of 1808 and the resulting Peninsular War with Napoleonic France. The bloody conflict and the horrible famine of Madrid were witnessed by Goya himself, or were revealed to him from the accounts of friends and contemporaries. From 1810 to 1820,...