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For some critics, this is all a callow waste of energy. It seems pathetic to take the most powerful of all artist-moralists, an artist who needs no apology or explanation and for whom the deadening phrase "old master" seems utterly inappropriate, and make these sterile simulacra, these crass copies. The critic Robert Hughes, who is writing a book on Goya, has dismissed the Chapmans' translations of his images as superficial exercises. Chapman said he hoped visitors would not be distracted by “personality antics” and would focus instead on what had brought him and Dinos to The Disasters of War in the first place – “but, having said that, of course it’s going to be amazing to see”. His depictions of torture, rape, starvation and execution have long fascinated the British artists, informing their work and eventually leading them to inform his.

It's just this kind of pronouncement that has driven previous inteviewers (Lynn Barber, Johann Hari) nuts, prompting them to denounce the Chapmans brothers as pretentious, anti-Enlightenment artists who wallow in our irrationality and baseness, who merely add shit to shit. "Well, we're not anti-Enlightenment," counters Jake when I put this to him. "We're all part of the Enlightenment, in the sense that we're on a burning Concorde and we can't get off. But we're very suspicious of this idea of progress and of reason." 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).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. Whilst initially repulsive, Sturm und Drang in fact manifests a kind of bathos the Chapmans have been riffing on throughout their career. Its grotesquery is reminiscent of 80s splatter films, campy and melodramatic. The pop-cultural cliché of the scary clown further serves to distance the sculpture from true horror; it is outdated and loud. 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. The original Goya on which this sculpture is based depicts three mutilated men strung up on a gallows-shaped tree. One, partially obscured, is hung by his legs, one by his arms and the third, victim of the most extreme mutilation, is himself divided in thirds; inverted body, decapitated head and severed arms. All have been castrated. A previous sculpture by the Chapmans depicts the scene fairly literally. Time has clearly passed since then, and the decay is evident; this tree is writhing with maggots, the human forms reduced to bone. The severed head, in the original mustachioed and oddly serene, is a fiendish skull, with bat ears and a clown’s nose. The idea, according to the exhibition’s curator, Lola Durán, is to illustrate just how profoundly Goya has influenced artists from Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí to the Chapmans.

This work is an assemblage of eighty-three small mixed media sculptures composed of bought, reformed and modelled elements. The sculpture is made of a variety of materials, mostly plastics.Our interest is in what adults do to children and the image of innocence they project on to them," Jake continues. "Our thought about children is that they're pretty much psychotic, and that through sweets and other forms of coercion they are civilised." Spoken, I say, like a father. "Like a father of three," he says. (Dinos has two daughters.)Would Jake be happy for his kids, aged between three and 11, to see the show? "Of course. There are definitely things I wouldn't want them to see, and which I will protect them from seeing. But the things we've imagined in our art are anaemic compared with what kids imagine. I know it was a long time ago that we were kids [Jake was born in 1962, Dinos in 1966], but we were never innocents, were we?" The Chapman Brothers have embraced this role as provocateurs, with an energy and humour that makes their works alternately affronting and highly amusing. In their words: “If you look at the genealogy of our work beginning with the first Goya prints we used, we got the book, we chopped it up, then we got the little soldiers and we chopped them up. It’s art as a creative and a destructive act, but, in our case, it’s definitely more destructive.”

References to the pervasiveness of brand names, consumerism, and globalization feature in much of the Chapmans's work. Sometimes this is overt as in The Chapman Family Collection (2002), in which Ronald McDonald is presented as an ancient deity, or more subtle such as the inclusion of Nike trainers in many of their sculptural works involving child mannequins. The "new" work is called Insult to Injury. The exhibition in which it will be shown for the first time, at Modern Art Oxford, is called The Rape of Creativity. Unholy Libel: Six Feet Under; exhibition catalogue, Gagosian Gallery, New York 1997, reproduced (colour) fig.xvii [pp.98-9] The Chapmans once told the art critic Robert Rosenblum that Great Feat! represented a secular crucifixion, ‘because the body is elaborated as flesh, as matter. No longer the religious body, no longer redeemed by God. Goya introduces finality – the absolute terror of material termination’. There is something troublingly artful about the arrangement of the figures. They have been posed by their murderers – as a warning to others – in a gruesome echo of the classical statue of Laocoon and his two sons writhing in the coils of a huge serpent. Robert Hughes wrote of Goya’s macabre trio: ‘They remind us that, if only they had been marble and the work of their destruction had been done by time rather than sabres, neoclassicists. would have been in aesthetic raptures over them.’The Chapmans realise the fragmented classicism hinted at in Goya’s print in the heroic scale of their sculpture, but they mean the magnification to assault rather than uplift the viewer. 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.

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Reading this, I burst out laughing at the thought of two strange men sitting on my daughter's bed at dusk reading such risibly ghoulish stuff. What would the second prize be? Two bedtime stories from Jake and Dinos, at a guess. 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 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." The message that the Chapmans have taken from Goya is that today we’re still living in the midst of violence – just turn on the TV news. It’s mean to make us think about the senselessness and confusion of war.” The graphic images of rape and impalement, she added, were meant to fascinate and appal the viewer.