Photography was only in its infancy and the cumbersome gear it required made drawing a far more efficient and economical method of documentation.Īround the same time a Swiss schoolteacher named Rodolphe Topffer produced "Les Amours de Mr. By the 1840s newspapers were sending artists to the front to send visual dispatches back home. Goya brought the viewer close up, like a war photographer, and provided captions such as "I saw it," which leave no doubt as to his relationship to the horrors he shows us. Like Callot, Goya made these prints on his own and in fact they were not even published until many years after his death.
Some 180 years later, Francisco Goya, clearly inspired by Callot, created his "Disasters of War" to record what he'd seen of the ravages the Peninsular War wrought on his native Spain. While the text accompanying his images of hanged, tormented soldiers and civilians was not his own but that of a writer friend, it amplifies the act of personal witness at the heart of the whole series. Rare for its time - when the vast majority of artwork was commissioned by nobility or clergy - Callot produced the series on his own as a testament to the horrors he'd seen. Released in 1633, Callot's "The Miseries of War" was a series of etchings accompanied by rhyming couplets created to document the atrocities of the conflict between France and his native Lorraine.
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