4.9/5
Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son straight onto the plaster of a room where he sat down to eat. Nobody commissioned it. Nobody was meant to buy it, and he never gave it a title or wrote a word about it. The man holding the brush was in his seventies, deaf, just back from an illness that nearly killed him, and living in a country house on the edge of Madrid.
It looks nothing like the Goya paintings most people picture: the tapestry cartoons, the duchesses, the royal family lined up in their silks. This is a naked old god in the dark, tearing into a body with his teeth. Two hundred years on, it still makes people step back.
So why put it over the dinner table? Goya never said. But the house and the paintings that shared the room with it tell you a good deal, and the answer is stranger (and funnier) than the usual story about a mad old man.
What Saturn Devouring His Son shows
A gray-haired giant crouches out of blackness. His fists clamp around a headless body, and the knuckles go pale with the effort. The head is gone, and he's biting into an arm. Blood runs from the torso and between his fingers. His eyes are open so wide you can see white all around the pupils, and he's looking past the victim, almost at you.
There's no throne, no scythe, no sky, no setting of any kind. Goya stripped out every prop that would tell you this is a myth. The canvas is 143.5 × 81.4 cm, a little under five feet tall. its catalogue entry in Madrid dates it 1820–1823 and lists the technique as mixed method on a mural transferred to canvas.
Two details change how you see it. X-rays of the Black Paintings show earlier pictures underneath, and under Saturn there was originally a dancer. And the body being eaten belongs to a young adult, possibly a young woman, judging by the hips. Valeriano Bozal's essay on the series (in Spanish) makes the point that this sets it against Judith and Holofernes, painted in the same room: there a young woman kills a powerful older man, here an old man devours a young woman.
A house called the Quinta del Sordo
On 27 February 1819 Goya bought a country house near the Manzanares River, just outside Madrid. Locals already called it the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man's House, after an earlier owner who was also deaf. Goya had been deaf since an illness in 1793. His housekeeper, Leocadia Zorrilla, lived with him and cared for him through his last years.
At the end of that year he fell gravely ill. He recovered, and in 1820 he painted the thank-you portrait he painted for his doctor, Eugenio García Arrieta, tending him. Goya's inscription along the bottom thanks Arrieta for pulling him through "a painful and dangerous illness endured at the end of the year 1819 in the seventy-third year of his life."
After that, Goya covered two rooms of the house, one on each floor, with fourteen paintings in oil-based paint, heavy on blacks and dark pigments. No patron and no public. They're called the Black Paintings for the palette and for what's in them: old age, witchcraft, violence, a dog half-sunk behind a slope.
Why a dining room?
Saturn hung in the ground-floor dining room. Here's the layout as it's usually reconstructed from the inventory made at Goya's death in 1828 and from photographs Jean Laurent took while the murals were still on the walls:
- On either side of the entrance door: the woman in black leaning on a mound, and Two Old Men, a bearded old man with a demonic figure whispering in his ear.
- On the far wall, facing the door: Saturn and Judith and Holofernes.
- On the side walls, facing each other: The Pilgrimage to San Isidro, a procession of wailing pilgrims, and a moonlit coven crowding around a goat.
- Also in the room: Two Old Men Eating, one of them more corpse than man.
Look at that list again. A room where you eat, decorated with a god eating his child, two ghouls eating soup, and a witch's banquet. Placement like that reads as a joke, a black one, made by a man who spent his dinners staring at it.
That's the reading I find most convincing, and I'm not alone. The Goya scholar Manuela Mena pushed back on the idea of a broken, melancholy artist in a 2019 interview: "he was actually an optimist with a great sense of humor, very rational and very clear in his mind, right to the end of his life."
The idea gets sharper once you remember who faced Saturn across the room. It was Leocadia's portrait, and Leocadia was 35 years younger than Goya. Read the body as a young woman's and the old god as Goya himself, and the painting turns into savage self-mockery about an old man and a young companion. There's a long piece on three ways to read it that sets this beside two other interpretations.
You don't have to accept that. But it's a better fit for the room than madness.
The myth, and the Rubens Goya knew
The story is Roman. Saturn, god of time, was warned that one of his children would overthrow him, so he ate each one at birth. His wife saved the last, Jupiter, by handing Saturn a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Jupiter grew up, beat his father and threw him out of heaven.
Goya very likely knew the Flemish master's version of the myth, painted in 1636–1638 for Philip IV's hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada, and later moved among the Spanish Crown's palaces. Put them side by side and you see what Goya threw away. Rubens gives you the scythe, the stars, a muscular god and a screaming baby kicking to get free. It's a mythological painting with all the labels on.
Goya had also tried the subject before. In a red chalk drawing from about 1797, Time Devouring Men, Saturn sits at a table, of all places, one child's leg in his mouth and another child in his hand, ready for the next course. Twenty-odd years later the comedy has gone underground, and the figure has turned into something closer to a trapped animal.
What it might mean
Goya left no explanation, so every reading is a guess. The main ones:
Power that eats its own. The simplest reading: Saturn as the human fear of losing power. Many people extend that to Spain, where Goya had lived through the French occupation he painted in his firing squad at night and then the authoritarian court of Fernando VII. A ruler devouring the young fits either.
Time. Saturn was the god of time, and the painter was an old man who had just survived an illness he expected to die of. Time eating everything it makes is an easy reading to reach for.
A father's fears. Of Goya's children, only one son, Javier, lived to adulthood. A 1990 essay by Jay Scott Morgan tied the picture to that.
The dinner-table joke. See above. It's the one that takes the room seriously.
These can overlap. A good painting can hold a political fear and a private joke at the same time, and this one probably does.
From plaster to the Prado
The painting nearly didn't survive. Goya gave the house to his grandson Mariano in 1823 and left for France the next year. He died in Bordeaux in 1828. The Quinta passed through several owners until Baron Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger bought it in 1873.
Erlanger had the murals lifted off the walls. From 1874 Salvador Martínez-Cubells, a restorer at the Prado, transferred them from plaster to canvas, and a great deal of paint was lost along the way. In 1878 the canvases went to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, shown at the Palais du Trocadéro. Erlanger then gave them to the Spanish state in 1881, and they have been on view at the Prado since 1889. The house itself was demolished in 1909.
What you see now has been worked on more than once, with restorations in 1919, 1973 and 1987 that included repainting damaged areas, the eyes among them. The Fundación Goya en Aragón keeps a full record of its restorations and loans if you want the details.
In 2022 the Prado showed a film that rebuilt the vanished house, by the artist Philippe Parreno, in a gallery near the originals. It's a reminder of what was lost: the paintings were made for two specific rooms, and those rooms are gone.
Seeing it in Madrid
All fourteen Black Paintings hang together in Room 67 of the Prado's Villanueva Building. Saturn is smaller than most people expect. Upstairs pieces hang in the same room, including the small dog sinking behind a slope, which I'd argue is the stranger picture of the two. If you're working through the pictures people recognize from across a room, the Goya room is one of the few places where the famous image is also the strangest thing on the wall.
For a wall that can take it
Saturn isn't a picture for everyone's dining room, though Goya clearly thought it belonged in one. Our painters copy it by hand in oils on canvas, stroke by stroke, working the dark ground and the pale fists the way Goya built them on plaster. If a quieter Goya suits your walls better, browse the rest of his work our painters copy and pick the one you'd happily eat under.
Sources
- Museo del Prado, Saturn (P000763)
- Museo del Prado, Enciclopedia: Pinturas negras
- Museo del Prado, Rubens, Saturn devouring a Son
- Museo del Prado, La Quinta del Sordo by Philippe Parreno
- Minneapolis Institute of Art, Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta
- Fundación Goya en Aragón, Saturn Devouring One of His Children
- Artnet News, Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son
