Goya’s black paintings
their pilgrimage is earning them their suffering’s end. They are created by God, live out their eternal journey of suffering, and their thread is finally cut, a small part of the tapestry of life.
Pilgrimage to San Isidro, Francisco Goya
Flawed creation: Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian views demonstrated in Saturn devouring one of his sons
One can see the true nature of these higher powers in another work, and possibly the best-known of the black paintings, Saturn devouring one of his sons . The work depicts the god Saturn cannibalizing his own child as in the myth. One interpretation is that Goya here too was using Greek mythology to illustrate the cruelty of the powers above us to humanity, their own creation. Goya communicates this through Greek myth because there is no equivalent in the Christian cannon. The Christian God is perfect, and imperfection the realm of man.
At an earlier stage in his career Goya expressed a view that no matter how talented the artist, when painting from nature, seen next to the original ‘ one is the work of God, the other of our own miserable hands ’ . 3 However, towards the end of his life, this painting seems to depict the opposite, Saturn as a flawed creator scared of his own creation, his son. He is just as human as Goya and just as fearful of his fellow humans. When analysing Saturn devouring his son, critic Werner Hofmann references the medieval idea of the four humours, the theory that an individual’s personality is determined by the ratio of different substances in their blood. 4 The group known as melancholics, whose blood contained primarily black bile, were often called the children of Saturn. Melancholics included many types of individuals, the mentally ill, beggars, criminals, monks, and artists. To better understand this painting, one can look at Peter Paul Rubens’ depiction of the same scene, as does Hoffman. 5 In Rubens’ work, Saturn is animalistic, and tears into the child’s tender flesh with pleasure, yet in Goya’s painting Saturn’s son is fully grown, and as he chokes on him Saturn seems just as
Saturn devouring one of his sons , Francisco Goya
3 Tomlinson 1994: 306. 4 Hofmann 2003: 244-45. 5 Hofmann 2003: 243-44.
17
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker