Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Saturn Devouring One Of His Sons, 1821-1823, 143.5 x 81.4 cm (Prado, Madrid)
One of the “Black Paintings” that Goya painted on the walls of his house outside Madrid, this image was originally located on the lower floor of the house known as “la Quinta del Sordo.” Goya painted on the walls using several materials including oil paint. The “Black Paintings” had suffered significant damage and loss in their original location and when they were removed from the walls and transferred to canvas by Baron Émile d’Erlanger shortly after he aquired the house in 1873. Please note that Saturn is also known as Cronus or Kronus.
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:03] We’re in the Prado in Madrid, and we’re looking at Goya’s Black Paintings.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:09] We’re in a room filled with them.
Dr. Zucker: [0:11] They had been the paintings that he had made to decorate his home just outside of Madrid — literally they’ve been painted on the walls — and we’re looking the most striking of these panels, “Saturn,” sometimes referred to as “Saturn Devouring One of His Children.”
Dr. Harris: [0:25] It had been prophesied to Saturn that one of his sons would dethrone him. Saturn is the god of time. So, in order to prevent that occurrence, Saturn devours his children as they’re born, but one escapes, Jupiter, and so Saturn in the end is dethroned and he can’t escape the fate that’s been allotted to him.
Dr. Zucker: [0:49] In fact, one could argue that he causes his fate by trying to reverse it. So it’s this terrible story, rendered in the most horrific way possible. It’s a reminder that this is an allegory for the ideas that Goya was thinking about at this moment.
Dr. Harris: [1:05] Of power?
Dr. Zucker: [1:06] Of power and the way in which a power treats its own children, its own charges.
Dr. Harris: [1:12] In order to stay in power.
Dr. Zucker: [1:14] Goya had seen the Spanish state, the Spanish monarchy, destroy the country.
Dr. Harris: [1:19] Well, then he saw Napoleon’s army destroy the country. Then he saw the restoration of the monarchy destroy the country.
Dr. Zucker: [1:27] And so this notion of the cyclical nature of time, the notion of turning on one’s own charges, turning on one’s own children. But here rendered allegorically, but in the most vivid and I cannot imagine more powerful manner.
Dr. Harris: [1:40] In one way, I read Saturn’s bulging eyes, his grasping hands, and his frenetic gestures…
Dr. Zucker: [1:48] Desperation.
Dr. Harris: [1:48] …in one way as “I’m not going to lose my power.” But on the other hand, it also feels like he knows he must do this. He’s aware of how terrible it is and just does it in this insane, chaotic, frenzied way.
Dr. Zucker: [2:07] He is, as Goya has rendered him, almost dissolving. You can see his basic anatomy, of course. But look at his right elbow and the way in which the skin wraps around. His forearm almost dissolves. His shoulder begins to dissolve. We can see his thighs. They begin to pick up the light. Then there seems to be an extra piece of him just above, let’s say, his left hip.
[2:34] And so there is this way in which his insanity is in a sense he’s coming apart, and this interest in rendering the meat of the body, the flesh of the body, in all of its violence, and all of its physicality, in all of its grotesqueness.
Dr. Harris: [2:52] I think the word “flesh” is right. There’s something about his own body that looks like meat, like butchered meat, and at the same time, that he is butchering and eating his own son.
Dr. Zucker: [3:05] This is the result of what Goya witnessed. This is Goya’s reflection of the world that he saw.
Dr. Harris: [3:11] And his understanding of humanity and what it was capable of.
[3:15] [music]
