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Jake, inevitably, has an explanation. "People confuse us with our work," he says. "In our view, no work of art has ever been personal. There's neither of ourselves in this work." The Chapman Family Collection is one of a number of works by the artists that make reference to McDonalds; others include The Rape of Creativity 1999 (private collection), Rhizome 2000 (private collection) and Arbeit McFries 2001 (Tate L03203). Apart from Goya's surviving proofs - above all, a unique album with his handwritten captions in the British Museum's prints and drawings collection - there are no entirely "original" sets of the Disasters; published posthumously, it does not even have Goya's original title - he called the etchings "Fatal consequences of the Bloody War in Spain against Buonaparte and other Emphatic Caprichos".

The new works are not in the studio when we talk about them. I feel I have a pretty good idea of the Chapmans' approach to Goya, so I don't worry too much about this. We talk about criticism and the way it resorts, always, to the humanist rhetoric of moral, emotional and political meaning. We laugh at the pious things the art critic of the Sunday Times said about them. Along with other members of the YBAs, the Chapmans's work was often gleefully tasteless and the brothers seemed to set out explore the topics most likely to cause offence, relishing the controversy they created and using it is as a means of self-promotion. This purposeful provocativeness led to accusations of childishness, and worse, that their work was immoral, and even illegal, and shouldn't be on display to the public. Yet the antecedent they themselves claim puts the gesture in a different light. In the 1950s, points out Jake, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, the great abstract expressionist painter. On the face of it, Rauschenberg was being aggressive - as a younger artist, a founder of pop and conceptual art, he was erasing the work of the older, dominant generation in a flamboyantly oedipal gesture. Yet he said he chose De Kooning for this fate specifically because he admired him; and he sought the older artist's permission. Destruction can be an act of love.

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Goya's Disasters of War is a precocious modern masterpiece, a work left by its creator as his final savage bequest to the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries - it was far too anti-clerical and unpatriotic to be published in his lifetime, and the first ever edition came out in 1863, three and a half decades after his death in 1828. From the very start of its public existence, it has been experienced not as a historic but as a contemporary work, its images so urgent and truthful that they function as living, new art.

The Chapmans' favourite artist, Francisco Goya, once produced an etching called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. "That phrase has long been held to show that Goya was a supporter of Enlightenment rationality and the progress of reason. But I prefer the version of that phrase by Deleuze [the French philosopher]. He said it was insomniac rationality that produces monsters. The Enlightenment has made a fetish of reason. Goya didn't and we don't." Many of the brothers' works have their basis in the art of others, of particular inspiration are the etchings of Goya, which the Chapmans recreated in miniature in Disasters of War (1993) and as a life-size sculpture in Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994). Later, they directly appropriated original artwork, adding to and painting over the etchings of Goya, watercolors by Adolf Hitler, and 18 th and 19 th century oils.

Children who visit the gallery will get some protection from the Chapmans' more grotesque imaginings. "We're scatter-hanging the gallery," explains curator Selina Levinson, "so we can put the most upsetting images higher up." How does Jake feel about this cunning if sanitising hang? "In this case we have been relaxed about it. We have to be respectful of [the gallery's] thoughts about what the public and the trustees will find acceptable." The Chapman brothers have worked as a collaborative team since the early 1990s. Disasters of War was their first major work. It is a one in thirty-second-scale model based on a portfolio of etchings by Goya (Fransisco de Goya y Lucientes, 1746-1819), of the same title, depicting the atrocities of war experienced and witnessed during and after the Napoleonic invasions of Spain in 1808. Goya's eighty-three etchings contain scenes of brutality and horror such as bayonetting, mutilation and decapitation. The Chapmans have translated each of the etchings into a three-dimensional tableau made of hybrid toy figures which have been pieced together from various sources and painted over. Goya's dark settings have been replaced by clumps of simulated grass of the type used in architectural models. Each miniature scene is set on a grass-covered island of irregular form; the islands are clustered together on a large white plinth and covered by a perspex box. The Chapman bothers, however, note that they are not making a point about human savagery, rather about art, and its eventual impotency. Picasso turned to Goya for inspiration when he produced Guernica (1937), a powerful piece which responded to the bombing of a Basque country village in northern Spain by German and Italian warplanes. The work is revered now, but had no impact on the course of the Second World War and its resulting 60 million deaths. Art cannot stop violence, the Chapman brothers assert, just as Picasso's Guernica was unable to prevent the horrors of the Second World War. Significant exhibitions of their work include the Young British Artists (YBA) showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. They were nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 2003 but lost out to Grayson Perry.

Unholy Libel: Six Feet Under; exhibition catalogue, Gagosian Gallery, New York 1997, reproduced (colour) fig.xvii [pp.98-9] in luc tuymans’ vision, caravaggio was the first to transcend classical and mannerist tradition thanks to the psychological realism expressed by his innovative pictorial language; he also embodied the spirit of the baroque artist and the wish to communicate with the public through the power of representation. I think that works pretty well," says Chapman. (Dinos did not want to be interviewed, and, it later turns out, is busy colouring in the final artwork for this week's opening of their Whitechapel Gallery show.) Aren't these images too disturbing for children? "Nope: there's nothing we've done here that can rival the darkness of the imaginations of children. They aren't the innocents that adults want them to be." The Chapmans have remade Goya's masterpiece for a century which has rediscovered evil. And I have fallen into their trap. In 2003 the Chapmans held a show at Modern Art Oxford called The Rape of Creativity. At this they displayed a range of pieces including Insult to Injury, a series of original etchings by Goya which they "rectified" by adding clown and puppy heads to all the victims depicted. The pair received a 2003 Turner Prize nomination (Britain's foremost contemporary art award) for their work. Their Turner Prize exhibit included Insult to Injury alongside new works Sex I, a sculpture of decaying and dismembered corpses hanging from a tree and Death, a bronze statue of two sex dolls painted to look like plastic. Although the two were beaten by Grayson Perry, they did win the Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy summer exhibition the same year.The connection between making toy soldiers and making mannequins seemed to be the only way to maintain a relationship between found objects or readymade, which we could manipulate … Disasters of War … was made with the intention of detracting from the expressionist qualities of a Goya drawing and trying to find the most neurotic medium possible, which we perceived as models. It gave us a sense of omnipotence to chop these toys up.