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It is one of the most riveting paintings ever made. In 1808 the populace of Madrid rose up against an occupying French army, an uprising that was soon crushed; the painting records the mass executions of insurgent Spaniards that began before dawn on the third day of May. Goya captures the appalling, machine-like process of the slaughter, implied by the piled-up bodies and the waiting line--those men in the light, seconds away from death, who have time only for a single burst of emotion: mute terror, fervent prayer to an indifferent god, or a final bellow affirming life and existence. And then they too are dead. It is impossible not to think of their dying and impossible not to imagine oneself in that circumstance. One wonders: How would I react? Would I be brave? Again and again one's eyes return to the men in that circle of final light.
It is only later that the mind returns to the other men in the picture. The faceless ones, automatons with guns, the members of the firing squad. Although their pull on the viewer is more gradual than that of the doomed men in the light, it is just as powerful. For those French soldiers were the agents of one of the most magnetic of human dramas, the taking of life. How could they do it? What did they feel? Did they feel? Perhaps they were evil, or perhaps they were coerced. Or perhaps they truly believed in the necessity of their actions.
One of the great horrors of a world that provides its Goyas with endless such scenes to paint is the possibility that after the smoke clears and the corpses are removed, the executioners give the executions no thought whatever. More likely, though, at least some of those faceless men do reflect on their work, and do feel guilt over it--or at least fear that others will someday judge them as well. In fact, such remorse seems pervasive enough that firing squads have evolved in a way that, in some circumstances, accommodates it. Central to that evolution are some subtly distorting aspects of human cognition that have much to do with how people go about killing people, how they judge people and how they set...