Saturn Devouring one of His Children
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Goya ranks among the very greatest of Fantastic painters. In several series of astounding engravings which recall the master of the grotesque, Jacques Callot., Goya plumbed depths of human cruelty, stupidity and suffering in distorted images so solidly anchored in the real world that, in the words of André Barret, the "social fantastic was born." In "the sleep of reason produces monsters" he created an image of the nightmare/waking antithesis so expressive that it has become almost emblematic of the Fantastic. And in the fourteen dark paintings of his final, pained years, he portrayed a world of solitude, cruelty and dread. The gruesome image of Saturn devouring his Children takes from ancient mythology an image of fearsome violence well-suited to the horrors of the era in which the painter lived. |
