Saturn Devouring His Son, c.1821/23 by Francisco de Goya
Canvas Print - 14766-GOY

The eyes come first: two white discs, wide and bulging, set in a face that looks as shocked as we are. Below them the mouth gapes around what is left of a body, and a streak of red runs from the lips down over a pale, headless torso. Saturn's enormous fingers dig into the small back so hard that the knuckles stand out like knots in wood. The child's legs hang straight and limp, its buttocks catching the light. The head and one arm are already gone.

There is almost no setting. The giant lunges out of pure darkness, one knee thrust forward at the left, the other folding down toward the lower right corner, as if he had dropped into a crouch on a ledge we cannot see. Matted gray hair spills over his shoulders. The palette is narrow, mostly earth brown, dirty ocher, ash gray and near-black, which makes the one passage of red all the more brutal. The brushwork is fast and rough. In places the paint is scraped thin, and his shoulders and back melt into the dark ground, so the figure seems only half made of flesh and half of shadow.

The story comes from ancient myth: Saturn, told that one of his children would overthrow him, swallowed each of them at birth. Painters before Goya usually showed a stern old man going about this grim business with a kind of composure. Here there is no composure at all. This Saturn is frantic, wild-eyed, almost panicked, and that is what makes the image so hard to forget. Read this way, the god becomes a picture of a very human dread: the terror of losing one's power, and what someone might destroy to hold on to it.

The painting belongs to the so-called Black Paintings, which Goya painted late in life directly onto the plaster walls of his own house outside Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo. Saturn hung on the ground floor, facing a portrait of Leocadia Zorrilla. Nobody commissioned these pictures, and nobody was meant to judge them, so he painted with complete freedom, in a mixed technique that included oil. After Baron Émile d'Erlanger bought the house in 1873, the murals were transferred to canvas, and a good deal of paint was lost along the way; some of the blurred, worn passages you see are scars of that operation. The baron gave the paintings to the Spanish state, and they have hung in the Museo Nacional del Prado since 1889.

Later artists treated these walls as a starting point for modern art. The German Expressionists and the Surrealists found in them a permission to paint fear and obsession without softening, and writers and filmmakers have returned to them too. Standing in front of it, though, the theory falls away and one detail remains: those eyes. He does not look like a god enjoying his power. He looks like someone who cannot stop.