The Colossus

A naked giant looms over a landscape, fists raised, his head among the clouds, while in the valley below a panicked crowd and their herds scatter in every direction. Long celebrated as one of Goya's most haunting images of war and terror - the Colossus as blind fear or brute force striding across a fleeing world - its attribution to him has more recently been questioned. Now in the Prado, whoever made it, the picture remains a brooding emblem of the dread that war unleashes, dwarfing the human anthill below.