Two men, isolated in a barren landscape, beat each other with heavy sticks. There’s no clear reason, no visible audience, and—crucially—no way out. Their legs vanish below the frame, long assumed to be submerged in mud. Later photographs taken before the painting’s transfer to canvas suggest they may have been standing in tall grass. Either way, they are fixed in place, bound to the ground, and to the fight.

Francisco Goya’s Fight with Cudgels (c. 1820–1823) is one of the most striking depictions of conflict in European art. Painted directly on the walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo (named for a previous occupant, though Goya was deaf himself by this point), it was part of his Black Paintings series—a set of 14 dark, intensely private works created in the last years of his life. These paintings were not commissioned, exhibited, or titled by the artist. They were made in seclusion, during a period of deep political and personal withdrawal, as Spain entered a new era of repression under Ferdinand VII.

The scene in Fight with Cudgels has been read as a visual metaphor for political stalemate. The two figures, likely commoners, engage in senseless violence with no resolution. The interpretation gained further traction given Goya’s historical context—postwar Spain, where the failure of the liberal constitution and the return of absolutist rule had left reformers disillusioned and opponents emboldened. It was the collapse of a hopeful vision. Goya had once supported Enlightenment ideals. By this point, he was painting on his walls in silence.

Some scholars have connected the work to Diego de Saavedra Fajardo’s Empresas Políticas, an emblem book on princely rule. One allegory, drawing from the myth of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth, describes how conflict can be deliberately sown by rulers to secure control. Warriors emerge from the ground, fight each other to death, and leave only a few survivors—enough to build a city, or a regime. Goya may have had this in mind, especially given the timing and the closed-loop logic of the image: two fighters locked into mutual destruction with nothing to gain.

But Fight with Cudgels doesn’t present a clear allegory. The force of the image lies in its ambiguity. The desolate field, the crude weapons, the mirrored poses—it’s an image of violence stripped to its most basic structure. Two people in opposition, and nothing else.

That makes it eerily relevant today. Whether in the long paralysis of electoral politics, the repetitive cycles of protest and repression, or the algorithm-driven outrage economy of social media, the terms of engagement often resemble Goya’s figures.

Unlike overtly propagandistic images, Fight with Cudgels doesn’t direct the viewer’s sympathy. It doesn’t ask us to pick a side. Instead, it stages a confrontation that feels both personal and structural—about not just who is fighting, but how conflict operates. It captures a type of fight that, once started, can’t be ended by either side alone.