Painting It Black

Saturn Devouring His Son-Francisco Goya 1819-1823

The most famous and the most horrific of the disturbing series of paintings that Goya painted directly onto the walls of his house outside Madrid in his later years, the so-called ‘Black Paintings’. The paintings were probably never intended for public view, it was only after his death that they were hacked off and transferred to canvas.

Intensely, hermetically private, the Black Paintings show Goya unmuzzling his fertile, macabre imagination. Traditionally believed to refer to the Greek myth of Cronus (Romanized as Saturn), the titan that devours each of his children in turn. Goya’s visceral masterpiece shockingly highlights the cannibalistic frenzy and wild-eyed derangement of the Father of the Gods as he holds the torso of the half-consumed body towards his gaping mouth. Whereas the Italian humanists of the Renaissance had, in their re-interpretation of Classical mythology, concentrated on cavorting nymphs in sunlit Arcadian landscapes, Goya instead  presents us with the vision of the primeval truths contained in myths; that of our darkest impulses unleashed in the blackest of nights. Goya is indeed the first of the moderns.