Jacques Callot

Predecessor to Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War, the series of 18 etchings by Jacques Callot emerges as the reaction to the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)—the longest and most destructive of all religious wars of that time. Callot analyses the grammar of war, describes its subsequent stages, denouncing the ferocity of human nature and the individual’s hopelessness in the face of suffering. One of the hopes that the Enlightenment brought a century later was to end all religious wars.