Saturn Devouring His Son: When Madness Paints Horror
A naked giant devours a human body. Goya painted this on his dining room wall.
By Artedusa
••12 min read
Saturn Devouring His Son: When Madness Paints Horror
A naked giant, eyes bulging, devours a human body. His hands grip the corpse. His open mouth bites into flesh. Blood everywhere. The victim's head and right arm have already been torn off, swallowed. What remains of the body hangs, inert, in the monster's hands.
This isn't a painting. It's a fresco painted directly on a house wall. Francisco de Goya's house. His house. Not for sale, not for exhibition, not to be seen by anyone. Goya painted this vision of horror on his dining room wall. He lived with it. He ate facing it.
Saturn Devouring His Son, painted between 1819 and 1823, is one of the fourteen Black Paintings, murals Goya created in his country house near Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo (the Deaf Man's House). He was seventy-three. He'd been deaf for twenty years. He'd survived two wars, a deadly illness, the Inquisition. He was bitter, furious, desperate. And he transformed his house walls into a nightmare gallery.
The Black Paintings were never meant to be seen. Goya never exhibited them. Never sold them. Never even mentioned them in his correspondence. After his death in 1828, they remained on the Quinta del Sordo walls for fifty years. When a new owner decided to transfer them to canvas in 1874 to preserve them, the world discovered the horror.
Saturn is the most famous. The most violent. The most unbearable. It's the very image of cannibal madness, self-destruction, time devouring its children.
Madrid, 1819: The Deaf Man Who Sees Too Much
Francisco de Goya is seventy-three. He's been deaf since 1792, victim of a mysterious illness that nearly killed him. Perhaps saturnism (lead poisoning from paints). Perhaps syphilis. Nobody knows. But since then, he lives in total silence. Cut off from the world. Locked in his head.
He was court painter to Charles IV. Portrait artist of kings, aristocrats, Madrid beauties. He painted joyful scenes, garden parties, tapestry cartoons. Then he painted war.
Between 1808 and 1814, Spain suffers Napoleonic occupation. It's an atrocious war. Massacres. Rapes. Summary executions. Famine. The Spanish people resist, rise up, are crushed. Goya sees everything. He engraves everything in his series The Disasters of War: 82 prints showing war's raw reality. No heroes. No glory. Just horror. Dismembered corpses. Raped women. Hanged men. Executed men. War as it really is.
In 1814, Napoleon is defeated. But returning King Ferdinand VII is worse than the occupier. He restores absolutism, reactivates the Inquisition, persecutes liberals. Goya, who'd supported Enlightenment ideas, is suspect. He stays silent. He paints for himself.
In 1819, he buys the Quinta del Sordo, an isolated country house on the Manzanares riverbanks. He withdraws there with his companion, Leocadia Weiss, and her daughter. And he begins painting on the walls.
Fourteen frescoes. Dark. Violent. Nightmarish. Witches. Screaming crowds. Decrepit old men. Macabre processions. And Saturn, the titan who devours his children fearing they'll dethrone him.
The Myth: When Time Eats Its Children
Saturn (Cronos in Greek) is the titan of time. He dethroned his father Ouranos (the Sky) by castrating him. Then, knowing an oracle predicted he'd be dethroned in turn by one of his children, he devours them one by one as they're born.
His wife Rhea manages to save Zeus by hiding him and giving Saturn a swaddled stone he swallows without noticing the substitution. Zeus, grown to adulthood, forces Saturn to regurgitate his brothers and sisters and takes power.
It's a metaphor of time destroying what it creates. Of the father refusing to make way for his children. Of revolution devouring its own revolutionaries. Of power perpetuating itself by eliminating all succession.
Goya painted this myth several times. In 1797, for the Duke of Osuna's house, he paints a still relatively classical Saturn, inspired by Rubens. The titan is powerful, muscular, but it's a conventional mythological representation.
Twenty-two years later, in his own house, he paints another version. This one has nothing classical. It's a monster. A madman. A nightmare made flesh.
The Madness: A Monster Who Isn't a God
Goya's Saturn isn't a majestic titan. He's a mad, emaciated old man with demented eyes. His disheveled hair. His gaping mouth. His claw-like hands gripping the corpse. He's not divine. He's pathetic. Terrifying and pathetic simultaneously.
Look at his eyes. They stare into emptiness. Or at us. He knows we see him. He knows what he's doing. And he continues. He can't stop. It's compulsion. Madness overwhelming him.
The victim's body isn't a child's. It's an adult. Perhaps even a woman—some art historians think they see breasts. Goya changes the myth. Saturn no longer devours newborns he could swallow in one gulp. He methodically tears apart an adult body. It's longer. More conscious. More sadistic.
There's no setting. No context. Just black background. Saturn emerges from darkness. He could be anywhere. In a cave. In a dungeon. In our bedroom. Horror needs no place. It's everywhere.
Goya paints with brutal technique. Furious brushstrokes. Thick impasto. Blood that isn't even really red—more brown, black, like dried, rotten blood. The flesh isn't pink and soft. It's gray, greenish, cadaverous.
This isn't academic painting. It's scream-painting. Howl-painting. Goya hurls his rage at the wall. He doesn't seek beauty. He seeks truth. The truth of horror. The truth of what man is capable of doing.
The Black Paintings: Apocalypse Gallery
Saturn isn't alone. The Quinta del Sordo walls bear thirteen other horror visions.
Judith and Holofernes: a woman brandishes a bloody knife above a decapitated corpse.
Two Old Men Eating Soup: two grotesque faces, human gargoyles, feeding like animals.
The Fates (or Atropos): three old women, one brandishing scissors to cut life's thread.
Witches' Sabbath: a demon goat presides over an assembly of deformed witches.
Duel with Cudgels: two men fight with clubs, sunk to their knees in the ground, condemned to fight eternally.
Pilgrimage to San Isidro: a crowd of grotesque faces, mouths open as if screaming, advances in a desolate landscape.
Dog: perhaps the most troubling. A small dog, just its head, emerges from an immense empty space. It looks upward. Toward what? Nothing. Emptiness. Absence.
Fourteen visions of a hopeless world. Without beauty. Without redemption. A world where men are monsters, where time devours, where the crowd screams, where death cuts the thread, where the dog watches nothingness.
Why did Goya paint this? On his own house walls? To live with these images?
Perhaps because he could no longer do otherwise. Because that's what he saw when he closed his eyes. Because seventy-three years of life in Spain—wars, famines, Inquisition, repression—had filled his head with nightmares he had to expel.
Or perhaps he didn't care. That he painted for himself, not for us. That these frescoes were his visual diary. His darkest thoughts materialized on the wall.
1874: When Nightmares Are Torn Away
Goya dies in 1828 in Bordeaux, in voluntary exile. The Quinta del Sordo changes owners several times. The frescoes remain on the walls, gathering dust, slowly flaking.
In 1874, a French baron, Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger, buys the house. He discovers the paintings. And decides to save them. He hires Salvador Martínez Cubells, Prado Museum restorer, to transfer the frescoes to canvas.
It's a delicate, dangerous operation. A canvas is applied to the fresco. Left to dry. Torn away. Part of the paint remains on the wall, lost forever. But the essential is saved.
The fourteen canvases are exhibited at the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition. The public is shocked. What horror! What bad taste! Goya is already famous, but these paintings correspond to nothing expected from an old master. They're not classical masterpieces. They're madman's screams.
The canvases don't sell. D'Erlanger offers them to the Spanish State in 1881. They enter the Prado Museum. And there, slowly, they begin to be recognized.
In the 20th century, expressionists, surrealists, modern artists discover Goya. They see him as a precursor. Picasso draws inspiration from him for Guernica. Francis Bacon for his screaming Popes. The Black Paintings become modern art icons.
Saturn is the most famous. Most reproduced. Most parodied too. You've seen it a thousand times. On t-shirts. In memes. Diverted, cited, copied. It's become the universal symbol of devouring, destruction, metaphorical cannibalism.
What Saturn Still Devours
Two hundred years after its creation, Saturn Devouring His Son remains unbearably violent. Because it shows something we refuse to see: our own capacity to destroy what we create.
Time devours its children. Each generation is replaced by the next. Fathers die. Children take their place. It's natural order. But some fathers refuse. They cling on. They suffocate their children. They prevent them from growing, surpassing them, replacing them.
Saturn is the absolute toxic father. The one who'd rather kill than let live. Who'd rather destroy than transmit.
But Saturn is also the revolutionary devouring his own revolution. The French Revolution guillotined Robespierre. Stalin liquidated the old Bolsheviks. Revolutionary power, fearing overthrow, eliminates those who might contest it.
Saturn is also Time itself. Chronos. Who inexorably destroys everything that exists. Who transforms children into adults, adults into old men, old men into corpses. Who rots bodies, collapses empires, forgets names. Nothing escapes Saturn. He devours everything.
Goya painted this in 1819. He was seventy-three. He felt old. He saw the world around him sink into reaction, repression, obscurantism. The Enlightenment he'd hoped for was defeated. The Inquisition was back. Liberty was dead.
Perhaps he painted Saturn as self-portrait. The old man who's seen too much. Who survived too many catastrophes. Who devours his own hopes, his own illusions, his own dreams. Who consumes himself from within.
Or perhaps he painted Spain. His country. The nation devouring its own children. Killing its geniuses. Refusing progress. Sinking into violence and ignorance.
Or perhaps he just painted a nightmare. A vision haunting him. An image that had to leave his head so he could keep living.
The Dog and the Void
There's another fresco in the Quinta del Sordo. Less famous than Saturn but perhaps more troubling still. Dog.
A small dog. Just its head. It emerges from the bottom of the painting. Above, nothing. An immense empty space. Ocher. Vaguely golden. The dog raises its head. It looks upward. Toward what? There's nothing. Just emptiness.
It's perhaps the most modern painting Goya ever made. Almost abstract. Almost minimalist. A century before Rothko and abstract expressionists, Goya paints emptiness. Absence. The nothingness the dog stares at, perhaps hoping something will appear.
This image is Saturn's counterpoint. Where Saturn is violence, action, devouring, the Dog is waiting, solitude, silence. Saturn screams. The dog waits. Saturn destroys. The dog hopes.
Perhaps Goya also recognized himself in this dog. Deaf. Isolated. Looking toward an empty sky. Waiting for something that will never come. Redemption. Justice. Peace. Meaning.
The Black Paintings are Goya's testament. What he bequeaths the world. Not beauty. Not consolation. Just truth. Naked, brutal, unbearable truth.
Saturn devours. The dog waits. And we, we look at these images two hundred years later, and we recognize our own world in them. Our own fears. Our own nightmares.
Goya didn't paint 1819 Spain. He painted eternal humanity. The one that devours its children and waits in emptiness. That destroys and hopes. That screams and falls silent.
The frescoes left the Quinta del Sordo walls. They're at the Prado now, behind glass, under sophisticated lighting. Millions of people see them each year.
But they keep their original power. The power to haunt us. To disturb us. To show us what we'd prefer not to see.
Saturn still devours. And we continue watching, fascinated and horrified, unable to look away.
Saturn Devouring His Son: When Madness Paints Horror | Art History
