Two millennia of looking at the nude,

of seeing it as a symbol of art's perfection

is reduced to this horrifying image

of sadistic cruelty.

In one of the paintings, he puts the lights back on.

We're able to see something, but what is it we're seeing?

The light is given to us to reveal another kind of horror.

These two huge peasant-like figures

beating the living daylights out of each other.

Blood is streaming down the head of one of them,

even as they sink deeper and deeper

into a kind of sandy quagmire.

This is what Spain has become.

Endless, relentless, mutual slaughter.

Now, all these monsters

and horrors and demons and dragons

of course had appeared all over European art before,

but where had they appeared?

They'd appeared in images of the Last Judgment

and the Apocalypse,

and they were always balanced

by a sense of the optimism of salvation.

But Goya has come to the conclusion

that God is absent without leave

and there's one painting, which in a sense is least likely

to have that horrifyingly pessimistic eloquence, but it does.

There are no figures, there's just a dog, a mutt.

But for this dog, the master is gone,

dead, slaughtered, missing.

He's no longer going to be fed.

He's simply faced with drowning

inside this formless brown vacuum.

It's all come down to this, then.

A dog without a master.

Spain without its God.

Humanity absolutely without civilisation.