Saturn Devouring His Son shows the Titan Cronos, called Saturn by the Romans, who in Greek myth swallowed his newborn children so that none could overthrow him. No one knows for certain what Goya meant by it, because he never explained it and gave it no title. Scholars have read it as a country devouring its own children, or as a link between the god and the painter himself.
Goya painted it on a wall of his house outside Madrid between about 1820 and 1823, with no audience in mind. He was in his seventies by then and deaf. The painting stayed on that wall until 1874.
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What draws the eye first is Saturn's stare, wide and round, and it is the part Goya may not have painted.
When the paintings on Goya's walls were later lifted off the plaster, the eyes were among the areas that suffered most, and they were repainted. The wild eyes that every reproduction shows are, at least in part, the work of someone else.
Photographs taken while it was still on the wall show more detail than the canvas does today. How much of the stare is Goya's has never been settled.
The myth Goya was painting
The Greek poet Hesiod, who lived around the seventh century BC, tells it in the Theogony. Cronos had learned from Earth and starry Heaven that he was destined to be overcome by his own son. So every child that came from the womb to its mother's knees, he swallowed.
The youngest, Zeus, never went down. His mother Rhea handed Cronos a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, and he swallowed that instead. Zeus grew up and the prophecy came true.
In Hesiod's lines the children go down whole. Nobody is bitten and nothing is torn. Goya painted the moment the poem skips, with a body in the god's hands. Almost two centuries earlier, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens had already shown the same god eating a child.
What You'll Discover
What Rubens did with the same god.
Where Goya hung the painting.
Why no one can say what it means.
How a painted wall became a canvas.