What do you do when you are the official court painter to a monarch and a foreign army installs a puppet king? Francisco Goya swore public loyalty to Napoleon’s occupying forces and then, in secret, etched some of the most brutal anti-authoritarian images ever made. This episode looks at Goya’s conflicted biography through the lens of his defining masterpiece, The Third of May 1808, and the events that inspired it.

We set the scene with the dysfunctional triangle of King Charles IV, Queen Maria Luisa and Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy, explain how Napoleon used a joint Portugal scheme to march 23,000 troops into Spain, and recount the May 2 uprising in Madrid and the firing-squad executions that followed. Then we deconstruct the painting itself: the kneeling laborer in white and yellow, the faceless soldiers, the lantern stripped of divine meaning, and the gritty matte paint surface, before tracing its influence on Manet, Picasso and Norman Rockwell.

• How the Peninsular War gave the world the term guerrilla war
• The Disasters of War etchings, the copper-plate process, and the print titled I Saw It
• Goya’s 1814 letter to the provisional government pitching a memorial to the glorious insurrection
• Why King Ferdinand VII despised the painting and why it stayed out of the Prado catalog until 1872
• The Spanish Civil War truck accident that damaged both canvases and the 2008 restoration