Saturn Devouring His Son

Saturn Devouring His Son (Saturno devorando a su hijo, or simply Saturn) is one of the Black Paintings that Francisco Goya painted in oil directly on the plaster walls of his house outside Madrid between about 1820 and 1823; transferred to canvas after his death, it is now in the Museo del Prado.

Goya bought the Quinta del Sordo, a two-storey house on the Manzanares, in 1819. Already deaf after an illness in 1792, he covered its walls with fourteen dark, uncommissioned pictures that were never meant to be seen in public. Saturn was one of six on the ground floor, which served as the dining room, hanging to the left of the window on the end wall facing the entrance, near Judith and Holofernes. Goya gave the murals no titles; their names come from later writers, starting with an inventory by his friend Antonio Brugada in 1828.

The traditional reading is the myth of the Titan Cronus, the Roman Saturn, who ate his children because it was foretold that one of them would overthrow him. Goya departs from the myth, where the children are swallowed whole: here a giant with gaping mouth and bulging eyes tears into a headless body with an adult build, gripping it so hard that his fingers dig into its back. Thick patches of black and white are broken only by ochre flesh and the red of the wound. Writers have compared it with Rubens's Saturn of 1636 and noted that Goya had drawn the subject in chalk in 1796–97 with none of this violence. Interpretations range from time devouring all things to Spain consuming its own children in war, and the scholar Fred Licht has warned that the traditional title may be misleading.

In 1823 Goya left for Bordeaux and the house passed to his grandson Mariano. From 1874 the restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells moved the murals onto canvas for Baron Émile d'Erlanger, who showed them in Paris in 1878 and gave them to the Spanish state in 1881. The canvas measures 143.5 × 81.4 cm.