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A dead turkey seems in mourning for itself, painted mostly in black, its pink head-the sole patch of bright color-propped up against a dark brown basket that is painted with utter virtuosity, one stroke for every crescent of wicker. To see such passages (others are the lacy scribbles of wet black paint that define the soft body feathers) is to realize why Goya's ability to summon up a single form with a single gesture, fusing the brush mark to the form depicted, was such an inspiration to Edouard Manet half a century later. The stiffness of death is recorded in the bird's splayed legs, thrust out as if in a last convulsion, and in its upcurving wing, like a final memory of flight.
Goya's picture of a butchered sheep is, if possible, more tragic still. The animal's flayed head seems to be witnessing its own death, in the form of two hunks of rib cage propped against one another, and the way Goya has rendered the structure of dark red meat and the spectral, yet dense and greasy white fat is both factual and haunting. These low mounds of form, bluntly placed against a background of no-space black, come out of the same sensibility that recorded the nameless piles of human bodies in The Disasters of War. This is the realization of the inevitability of death that the older vanitas paintings set out as metaphor, but here it is concrete and direct, inscribed in every molecule of sad flesh. One realizes that Goya could see and feel more death in some mutton than Rubens could put in a whole Crucifixion.