e621.net · 6184700

[quote]h5. The Consequences
Made circa 1820
Etching print and aquatint
Part of the Disasters of War series[/quote]
[quote]A man, perhaps a corpse, in the foreground, projected slightly foreshortened, is hovered over by a group of bats flying towards him. One of them perches on his chest and sucks his torso to feed on the blood.
This engraving should be considered a continuation of the previous one, no. 71, [i]Against the General Good[/i]. What is happening in this print is probably the result, symbolically represented, of the measures that the bat-eared scribe is writing. He could be writing the text on the taxes, perhaps ecclesiastical, which continued to increase the poverty of a society that was in abject poverty after the War of Independence.[/quote]