from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:
Spain’s experience of war has been better painted than it has been written. The few hundred metres of central Madrid that embrace both the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía modern arts centre, contain, within them, some of the most telling pictorial denunciations of war ever painted or etched. In his painting The Third of May, 1808, or The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill and his Disasters of War series of etchings Goya tells of the Spanish uprising against Napoleonic rule in 1808. ‘Yo lo vi’ – ‘I saw it,’ Goya scratched onto one of his copperplates of killing, rape and pillage. In the Reina Sofía, Picasso’s huge, grey-blue Guernica is populated with terrified mothers, dead children, maddened animals and dismembered bodies. It evokes a world numbed by terror.
The horror of Guernica, blitzed by the German Luftwaffe on Franco’s behalf in 1937, was real, and more so because it was innovative. An ancient human fear was turned into reality. Death rained from the sky. A local artist once showed me around the rebuilt town, telling me his memories of the fateful day. He had run for the hills as a boy and watched Guernica burn. What he saw was the invention of blanket incendiary bombing of civilian targets. What was shocking in 1937 became, sadly, commonplace within a decade. Guernica, and nearby Durango, were the experimental laboratories for the carpet bombing of Coventry or Dresden and, ultimately, for the nuclear wastelands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
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