MADRID, Spain — It's not a show for the squeamish or faint-hearted.

In its main spring event, Spain's Prado museum on Monday unveiled an exhibition featuring some 200 paintings and drawings by Spanish master Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, including many depicting in unnerving detail the horrors man is capable of unleashing.

"It's an exhibition to be seen, but it's not one to have a good time at," said Jose Manuel Mantilla, the museum's drawings and engravings chief. "One comes away from it distressed."

Titled "Goya in Times of War," the exhibit includes 90 paintings and more than 100 drawings and engravings from a 25-year period that spanned the changeover into the 19th century.

The show is part of Spain's 200th-anniversary commemorations of the country's war of independence after an invasion by Napoleon's troops.

"Art ought to show beauty, but it should also make us reflect," Mantilla said. "This show is a reflection on man's violence, and it makes Goya universal and very contemporary."

The centerpiece of the exhibition features two large-scale masterworks, the "2nd of May 1808" and "3rd of May 1808" paintings, specially restored for the show. They depict a gruesome revolt against French forces in Madrid and the chilling reprisal by Napoleon's troops the day after.

"It's a disturbing exhibition that leaves little room for optimism," said show curator Manuela Mena.

The show concentrates on Goya's work after 1793, when a near-fatal illness left the artist deaf.

"He came out the sickness renewed and started to paint differently. He was searching for independence and liberty," she said.

During this time, he evolves from official Spanish court painter to an independent artist blessed with a critical eye and an exceptional talent for realism, offering an intense insight into the nature of man.

He alternates from exuberant portraits of royalty in all their finery — such as the family portrait of Carlos IV — to dozens of paperback-book-size drawings and etchings of "Disasters of War," "Bullfighting" and "Follies," series with ironic captions depicting the cruelty, stupidities and vices of Goya's contemporaries.

The exhibit displays works from the troubled decades covering the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the ensuing treaties that brought an end to the Ancient Regime and ushered in modern Europe.

Organizers point out that in many ways, Goya was a privileged witness, something of a pictorial war reporter. But he broke with a style fashionable up to his time that eulogized war and instead highlighted its barbarity.

"It is the artistic diary of Goya in one of the most turbulent periods of Spanish history," said Prado director Miguel Zugaza.

Although the Prado has the world's largest collection of Goya, 75 percent of the show's work comes from outside, many from private collections, such as "Majas on the Balcony" and "Marquise of Montehermoso."

For curator Mena, the show challenges the myth that Goya was mad.

"The work we have before us could not come from a person not in possession of all his faculties," she said. "The madness was not inside Goya, but outside him."