Saturn Devouring His Son
Francisco de Goya (1746 to 1828) · 1820 to 1823
A giant with wild hair and staring eyes crouches in the dark and stuffs the body of a child into his mouth. The head and one arm are already gone; the fingers of the god sink into the pale flesh. In Roman myth the god Saturn, warned that one of his children would overthrow him, ate each as it was born. Rubens painted the story for the Spanish king and Goya knew that picture, but nothing in it prepares you for this. The giant's face is not cruelty but terror, as if he cannot stop himself, and the darkness around him is total.
Goya painted this directly on to the plaster of a wall in his house outside Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man's Villa, and never gave it a title. It was one of fourteen scenes in oil on the walls of two rooms, now called the Black Paintings, made when he was in his seventies, deaf, ill and living in a country ruled by an absolute king he despised. Look at the paint, which is dragged and scraped in broad strokes of black, grey and white with the body of the child the only bright thing. Some scholars think the figure was originally shown in a state of arousal, later painted over. Nothing in it was meant for sale or for anyone's eyes but his own.
After Goya left for France in 1824 the house passed through several owners, and in the eighteen seventies a French banker had the murals cut from the walls and transferred to canvas, an operation that damaged them and darkened them further. They were shown at the Paris World's Fair of 1878, found no buyer, and were given to the Spanish state in 1881. They hang together in a low gallery on the ground floor, and Saturn is the one that visitors stand before longest.
Did You Know? The painting was on the wall of Goya's dining room, where he ate his meals looking at it.
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