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The Mameluke hauled backward with the knife already home. Cavalry is only invincible while the crowd agrees it is.

This museum has hung the second day for years: the man in the white shirt, the firing squad, the lantern. This is the first day, painted as its pendant, and without it the shootings are half a story. By the spring of 1808 a French army had walked into Spain as an ally and stayed as a landlord; the royal family was being extracted piece by piece to Bayonne for Napoleon's convenience, and on the morning of 2 May a Madrid crowd gathered at the palace as the last royal child was loaded for the road. Somebody cut a carriage trace. Marshal Murat, commanding the occupation, had been waiting for exactly enough provocation, and sent in cavalry. The horsemen he sent made the day historic. Among the Imperial Guard squadrons were the Mamelukes, Egyptian troopers in turbans and scimitars, and the sight of Muslim cavalry riding down Spaniards in the Puerta del Sol touched a nerve seven centuries deep. The crowd, armed with sewing shears, workshop knives and paving stones, did the unthinkable: it closed with heavy cavalry in the open street and dragged riders from their saddles. Goya's canvas is that impossibility painted at gallop: a Mameluke hauled backward off his horse with a knife already in him, another slashing down at hands rising from everywhere, no heroes, no formation, a city fighting the way a dog fights. By afternoon it was over; perhaps 400 madrileños were dead in the streets, and Murat's firing squads worked through the night and the next dawn on Príncipe Pío hill, which is the painting two frames over. The rising failed in every tactical sense and succeeded in the only one that mattered: within weeks all Spain was in revolt, and the word guerrilla entered every European language from the war that followed. Goya painted both days in 1814, the French barely gone, petitioning the restored government to record, in his words, the most notable and heroic actions of our glorious insurrection. He was 68, stone deaf, and had spent the war painting French officers and Spanish patriots with the same brush; the two canvases were his settling of accounts. The Second of May took collateral damage of its own a century on: evacuated from the Prado during the Civil War, the truck crashed, and the canvas tore; Madrid restored it, the way the city restores this particular memory, thoroughly. The second of May is now the region's official holiday, which means the day the crowd lost is the day it chose to keep.