Upon reading that Muammar Qaddafi was killed and then apparently paraded through his regime’s final stronghold of Surt, I thought of Francisco de Goya. I chose a Goya etching for this morning’s first “3rd of May” post.

That piece, at left, is from Goya’s great print series “Disasters at War.” At first glance it might seem inappropriate: The Goya shows a Spanish patriot hanging from a tree while a French officer looks on with an icy mix of pleasure and indifference. Muammar Qaddafi was a murderous, self-obsessed dictator, not a patriot.

Still, the Goya communicated something about the grisliness of ugly death and the joy combatants take in killing. That’s one reason I used it.

The other reason stems from what New Yorker senior editor Amy Davidson pointed out more quickly than any other U.S. journalist: “It would be a mistake to draw lines too brightly — to ignore, for example, what might happen in the next triumphant days to the civilians of Surt.”

Davidson is right: Throughout the Libyan conflict, anti-Qaddafi forces have committed atrocities against those allied with the regime: The Daily Mail (UK) reported that rebels killed suspected pro-Qaddafi hospital patients in their beds and Amnesty International has told us that rebels have committed abuse, torture and extra-judicial killing as they’ve moved across Libya.

Goya knew that some people deserved to die — but he also understood that the story doesn’t end when one evil man is killed, that the parading of a dead man through the streets (and in today’s case, across cell phone networks too) only leads to continued depravity. Like Davidson said, it could get even uglier in Surt.

Goya’s “Disasters of War” is one of the grisliest portfolios in art: In one etching a man is impaled on a tree branch, anus-on-up. Elsewhere, corpses are mutilated and dismembered, and rape is imminent (above, right). Still, while depravity is nearly ubiquitous in “Disasters,” it’s never gratuitous. It’s only by including such detail — yo lo vi? — that Goya is able to caution us about the true and deeper disasters of war, about the way cycles of violence tend to feed upon themselves.

That helps separate Goya and “Disasters” from other great artist-chroniclers of war. Goya seems to have owned a set of engravings by 17th-century French artist Jacques Callot titled, “Miseries of War.” The 18 plates in Callot’s series show some of the horrors of  war. (Callot’s entire series is on view now at the Art Institute of Chicago in “Belligerent Encounters: Graphic Chronicles of War and Revolution, 1500-1945.”) In creating his “Disasters” Goya benefited from “Miseries,” but included in his portfolio a greater understanding of — and compassion for — the horrors perpetrated on civilians, for atrocities committed after killings and a greater anguish over how war made depravity commonplace.

Informed by Goya, I can’t quite celebrate Qaddafi’s death. The death of a dictator rarely ends the bloodshed.

Related: All the images in this post are from Goyas in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose new online collection tool offers high-res images of all three etchings:  No. 36, Not This Time Either (Tampoco),  No. 29, He Deserved it (Lo Merecia) and No. 9, They Don’t Want It (No Quieren). This digital gallery created by the New York Public Library presents the entire series in sequence. The series was apparently made between 1810-1820, but was not printed until 1863, two decades after Goya’s death.