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A rider goes over backward off the white horse with his dagger still up. He is a Mameluke of Napoleon's Imperial Guard. A Spaniard below him has both hands in his sash.

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 taken off to Bayonne piece by piece, for Napoleon's convenience. 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 painted that impossibility at a gallop. A Mameluke goes over backward off his horse with a Spaniard's hands in his sash. Another swings his scimitar down into the crowd. No heroes, no formation, a city fighting the way a dog fights. By afternoon it was over, with hundreds of madrileños dead in the streets. Murat's firing squads then worked through the night and the next dawn on Príncipe Pío hill. That is the other painting, the one with the white shirt. The rising failed as a fight and won as an example. Within weeks all Spain was in revolt, and the war that followed put the word guerrilla into every European language. 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 canvas took damage of its own 122 years later. Evacuated from the Prado during the Civil War, it rode a truck that crashed, and the paint 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.