Goya

Saturn Devouring his Son

I'm posting this today for no reason other than it just came to mind, as I thought about my trip to Madrid, remembering my days in the Prado.

The usual interpretation of this painting is pretty much what the title says explicitly, the idea being based on the Greek myth of Kronus who feared his children would betray him and take his throne, so he ate one.

I beg to object.  Yes, okay, it does allegorize the fear of the idea or feeling of endless generational renewal, fear of becoming irrelevant once one's children have grown up, of being replaced, forgotten.

But according to me it also means something else.  Present here is the obscure and perturbing need --present in all of us to some extent-- also shared by Narcissus. Falling in love with oneself, wanting oneself, wanting to please oneself.

Rubens' Saturn

Compare, for example, this painting with one by Rubens on the same theme.  Rubens puts some distance between Saturn and the son he's eating, but Goya puts Saturn's "son" in a position and at an angle reminiscent of another body altogether, but another body within Saturn's own, not a body foreign to his.  It is almost as if his "son" were an appendage of himself, instead of another person.

Rubens depicts a child with limbs, a head; it is unmistakable, it's a person.  But Goya's?  

It has half of an arm, its legs are stretched out and pressed together, so that it is almost a perfect cylinder.  Also, notice that this isn't really a child's body; it is a body with rather developed, tightened, inflated muscles.  He's gripping this body with both hands, another contrast with Rubens' Saturn; to me, this hints at a lack of control.  Rubens' Saturn is his son's "better" in a way, he is holding the baby's body with one hand, but Goya's Saturn is grabbing his.

Rubens' son is in a position of inferiority; Goya's is being brought up to Saturn's horizon or field of vision, up to his level, as it were.  Goya's Saturn is lifting that "body" and not leaning over it.

  

Further: Goya's "son" has no head.  No head.  A human without a head is a very strange symbol for a person, even in a painting depicting an anthropophagous scene.  Where its head ought to be more or less, we see Saturn's own, horrified.

So to me, in Goya's painting, Saturn isn't eating another person at all.  He is eating himself.