Exploring Goya's Saturn

(Goya)

Francisco de Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son subverts the traditional conventions of Classical mythological imagery to reflect the barbarism hidden beneath humanity’s thin veneer of civility. This critique of humanity is important to examine because it does not simply derive from an academic notion of civilization and its faults; it derives from Goya’s personal experiences with war, cruelty, and intolerance. During his time, Goya witnessed two of the most brutal events in Spanish history: the Inquisition and the Peninsular War. While the influence of these two events is seen more literally in Goya’s The Disasters of War prints, Saturn Devouring his Son provides and excellent metaphorical glimpse into Goya’s experiences.

As the beginnings of Western philosophy and the inspiration for the Renaissance, Classical culture is almost always used to connote high civilization and is represented in art as such. Muscular gods, beautiful goddesses, and noble heroes are often posed dramatically and with an air of sophistication. Goya’s Saturn defies all of these ideas. Naked and wide-eyed, Saturn (or Cronus) is depicted as little more than a murderous madman so megalomaniacal and paranoid he is willing to brutally cannibalize his own offspring to protect himself. While the painting is visual disturbing, the beauty of Goya’s painting is its unforgiving frankness. At the heart of the original myth is a crazed madman who eats his children; there is no veneer of Renaissance sophistication, a veneer that two centuries earlier smoothed over many of the violent and atrocious realities of Classical culture, in this painting. Goya digs beneath the surface of a culture held up as a model of high civilization and exposes the viciousness beneath. In doing so, Goya makes his strongest point: if the culture looked to as epitome of civilization is barbarous and violent, then the true and brutal nature of all culture is simply masked by a thin veneer of civility.

Goya, Francisco. Saturn Devouring his Son. 1819. Museo del Prado, Madrid.