“Saturn, my guy. Please do not eat your son, man. Not cool. Like I get that you’re a powerful Titan, but that’s your offspring! Relax a little bit bro. You’re scaring everyone. He’s not even that big, he won’t like fill you up.” If I were talking to Saturn this is what I would tell him if I saw him eating his child. Seems like a pretty simple solution to that problem.
Fortunately, I have never found myself in such a position. In fact most of what I know about the myth of Saturn eating his son, comes from a painting by Goya. Francisco Goya, Spanish artist extraordinaire, painted Saturn Devouring His Son somewhere between 1819-1823. Eschewing my interpretation of what should have happened, Goya instead decided to show Saturn mid-chomp. A slight cannibalism incident. Goya painted the scene on to the walls of his house, along with thirteen other works, known as the “Black Paintings.” Eventually Saturn was removed from the walls and transferred to the Prado Museum in Madrid. I was lucky enough to be able to see it in all its glory a few years ago while on a family vacation to Spain. For those of you not lucky enough to be able to see it in person here is the painting I am referring to.
Pretty intense. I know. But, as with all good paintings, I can’t keep my eyes off it. Even the digital version still manages to close a steel trap of attention around the imagination. According to the two paragraphs of a Wikipedia article I read about this, Goya painted Devouring somewhat in reaction to the Napoleonic Wars, as well as his fear of insanity. This painting, and the others in the series were most likely not meant to be seen by the general public and were of an incredibly personal nature for Goya. The names the paintings have been given are all posthumous as Goya himself never named the paintings.
I am not an art historian or critic, so I cannot offer much in the way of professional critique of this painting, other than that I think it absolutely rocks, and that we need more paintings like this. The visceral nature of the decapitation, the vigor with which the Titans’ hands clasp the back of the lifeless body, the stark off-white eyes of Saturn, these are all incredible details, that capture the imagination, turning a myth into vivid reality. Truly a wonderful work of art, if not exactly a peaceful one.
Saturn Devouring His Son is a romantic work. I mean that not in the roses on Valentine’s Day, and candlelit dinner sense, but the early 19th-century art movement sense. Partially a reaction to the onset of the Industrial Revolution, romanticism was seen in poetry, novels, art, music, and various other intellectual and artistic endeavors. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published a year before this painting was possibly started, is a prime example of a novel that falls within the Romantic spectrum. I don’t have the time here to give a full run-down of all that Romanticism had to over, but it was largely concerned with two things – intensely felt emotion, and exploration of the individual. There were other aspects of Romanticism – an obsession with the Medieval period, a glorification of nature, a distrust with the new industrial technologies – but the emotion and individual aspects are two of the strongest threads.
Both these things are quite evident in Goya’s painting. The clear focus on Saturn and all the subsequent emotion that one feels after, uh, eating your kid. Clearly Saturn is going through some shit. The crazed look in his eyes, eyes that look out at the viewer. The sense of shame that permeates the painting, as if Saturn has been caught doing something that he knows is wrong, but can’t quite bring himself to stop. The way in which most of his body is hidden. The closer you look the less detailed you realize Saturn’s form is in this painting, almost as if Saturn were willing himself to be anywhere but this painting. Even though there is another human body in this painting, that o Saturn’s son, it is rendered almost doll-like in its form. Hanging slightly to the right, a lifeless lump, overpowered by Saturn on every level, dropping from the Titan’s mouth like a rag. The individual, and the height of emotions that come from an act hopefully none of my readers have ever undertaken are all here, plain as day for the viewer.
So why highlight this painting? It’s not something that most people would want hanging in their bedroom, let alone their house. Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox maybe, but they’d be doing it for cringe “edginess” reasons so that doesn’t count. Of course, hanging it up in some random guy’s bedroom isn’t the goal that most artists start out with when they create a piece. Maybe some artists, but certainly not most. I think I like this painting because it confronts something horrible head-on. It faces it down, starring unremittingly at an unconscionable act and in that confrontation forces both the audience and the subject to reckon with what they’ve done. In a world where the people in charge often commit horrible acts and are rarely faced with the consequences of their own actions, a painting that at even suggests the merest hint of remorse from a monster speaks to me on some level. A horrible thought, but one I had while looking at this nonetheless. Perhaps this was Goya’s intention, most likely it was not. But the author is dead, as they say, so whatever. In any case this painting is over two hundred years old and still manages to speak across those ages, an incredible feat for any work of art.
While I don’t agree with all the philosophical or cultural underpinnings of Romanticism, it’s impossible to argue that some incredible work didn’t come out of it. This may be a glib thought to end on, but if someone wants to get this screen printed onto a giant blanket for me that’d be cool.