Truth has died
Technical details
Description
The political significance Goya wished to give the last prints of the series is evident: the defence of liberalism and opposition to the absolutism of King Ferdinand VII and the privileges of class, both of the nobility and the clergy. This scene has a clear political interpretation. A young woman with bare breasts, dressed in white and emanating light, lies dead on the floor. She is Truth, and also an allegory of the 1812 Constitution as the youth is crowned with a laurel wreath. On a gloomy night a group of friars and other clergy, presided by a bishop, prepare to bury her with hoes and spades. They are happy to inter such a dangerous lady who had done away with their privileges and had enacted the disenfranchisement of ecclesiastic property during the time the Constitution of Cadiz was in force. In contrast, a young woman seated on the right and holding scales weeps inconsolably for the death of Truth; she represents Justice, gagged and obstructed by absolutism.