and several others shield or hide their faces. This time the soldiers are not visible even from behind; only the bayonets of their guns are seen. (And it cannot be helped) is another of the early prints, from a slightly later group apparently produced at the height of the war when materials were unobtainable, so that Goya had to destroy the plate of an earlier landscape print to make this and another piece in the Disasters series. It shows a shako-wearing firing squad in the background, this time seen receding in a frontal rather than a rear view. Iconography and invention At first the painting met with mixed reactions from art critics and historians. Artists had previously tended to depict war in the high style of history painting, and Goya's unheroic description was unusual for the time. According to some early critical opinion the painting was flawed technically: the perspective is flat, or the victims and executioners are standing too close together to be realistic. Although these observations may be strictly correct, the writer Richard Schickel argues that Goya was not striving for academic propriety but rather to strengthen the overall impact of the piece. The Third of May references a number of earlier works of art, but its power comes from its bluntness rather than its adherence to traditional compositional formulas. Pictorial artifice gives way to the epic portrayal of unvarnished brutality. Even the contemporary Romantic painters—who were also intrigued with subjects of injustice, war, and death—composed their paintings with greater attention to the conventions of beauty, as is evident in Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) and Eugène Delacroix's 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People. The painting is structurally and thematically tied to traditions of martyrdom in Christian art, as exemplified in the dramatic use of chiaroscuro, and the appeal to life juxtaposed with the inevitability of imminent execution. However, Goya's painting departs from this tradition. Works that depicted violence, such as those by Jusepe de Ribera, feature an artful technique and harmonious composition which anticipate the "crown of martyrdom" for the victim. The man with raised arms at the focal point of the composition has often been compared to a crucified Christ, and a similar pose is sometimes seen in depictions of Christ's nocturnal Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Goya's figure displays stigmata-like marks on his right hand, while the lantern at the center of