the power of simplicity

The Dog is one of the so-called Goya’s  “Black Paintings”, the sequence of murals, usually with nightmarish subjects, that the artist painted on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo, a country house outside Madrid he occupied in the early 1820's. These murals were eventually detached, and ended up in the Prado Museum.

The picture's structure is minimal and non-specific. It is divided in two, an above and a below. The upper area is a pale golden yellow; the lower one is brown. The upper area fills most of the picture; the lower is a strip across the bottom with a slanting wavy edge. You could call the upper area sky, and the lower one earth.

You can see the dog as submerged in the lower area, buried in the ground, or swallowed up by something more liquid, like quicksand. It is stuck there, sinking, and is unable to extricate itself.

It raises its head, trying to keep itself "above water" but, the great empty gulf that towers above it only emphasises its helplessness.

Either way, it is a picture about bare survival in the face of hopeless doom. Whether the danger comes from below or from above, the picture tells us there is no escape. There is no way out of the drowning mire. There is no hiding place from the avalanche. This is the effect of its very elementary structure. The scene consists of nothing but an above and a below. Each is a source of dread, and the little dog is caught between them.

And the fact that we see only the dog's head, and nothing of its body and limbs, further reduces its chances of escape. It is deprived of any sense of movement or action. It is only a head, a consciousness, lost in a universe of terrors, afraid for its life.