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A laborer in a white shirt kneels with his arms flung wide and his palms open. He is in the pose of a man on a cross. Goya painted a small wound into the right palm.

The army brought its own lantern. That detail organizes the whole night: a big square lamp set on the ground between the squad and the condemned. The shootings on the hill of Príncipe Pío ran late, and the work needed light. It is the small hours of the third of May, 1808. The day before, Madrid had risen against the French occupation with knives, flowerpots and its bare hands, mobbing Murat's Mamelukes, the Egyptian horsemen of the French guard, in the streets. The rising took hours to crush. The reprisal was organized by nightfall: anyone taken with a weapon, and a weapon could mean scissors or a penknife, went before a firing squad, and the city counted its dead in the hundreds. The decree that governed the night survives over Murat's signature: all those arrested in the uprising, arms in hand, are to be shot. The parish registers did the counting. Goya painted it six years later, in 1814, with the French finally gone. He petitioned the returning government for funds to commemorate, as he put it, the most notable and heroic actions of the glorious insurrection, which is the language of every official war painting ever commissioned. Goya knew the language because he had spent a lifetime employed by its speakers. He had been court painter to the Spanish crown since before the war, and he kept the post under the French occupation. He painted Joseph Bonaparte's officials too. That was a survivor's ledger, and it needed balancing when the old dynasty came back. The two big canvases of the second and third of May were part of the balancing. He was 68, and stone deaf since a fever in his forties. Privately he had already made his real testimony: the Disasters of War, 80 etchings of famine, rape and execution seen close up. He never dared publish the plates. Spain first printed them in 1863, 35 years after his death. The paintings were the version the state could commission; the etchings were the version he kept in a drawer. Then he delivered the opposite. There are no heroic actions in The Third of May. There is a machine and a man. The squad is one body: greatcoats, tall caps, braced legs, muskets pointing the same way, and not a single face. Goya turned their heads away. He spent all the light, which is the squad's own lamp light, on the kneeling man in the white shirt, arms flung wide, a laborer with a sunburned face. In his open right palm, small and deliberate, there is a wound: Goya gave a day laborer the marks of the crucifixion. Around the lit man, the rest of the assembly line. The dead lie face down in their blood. A friar kneels with his hands clasped, and behind him the next group climbs the hill, covering their eyes, one man biting his fists. The city on the skyline is asleep or pretending. No moon, no streetlamps; the hill outside the walls was chosen the way such hills are always chosen, and Goya kept its darkness intact. Nothing in the picture argues; it reports the procedure. War painting before this was about the moment before or the glory after. Goya painted the mechanism itself, and painters have been answering him since: Manet borrowed the squad wholesale for his Execution of Maximilian, and Picasso kept the lantern's logic for Guernica. The painting itself eventually went to war. Evacuated from the Prado during the Spanish Civil War, it was gashed in a truck accident on the road to Valencia, mended, and hung back on its wall, scar and all. The lantern still holds the center. It will stay lit until the hill is finished.