Why Goya Never Wanted Anyone To See This

Eyes frozen wide with terror, a look that says the man has understood there is no way back. Out of the darkness emerges the gaunt body of an old man. His fingers tear into the flesh of a victim whose head he has just bitten off. No one was ever meant to see this painting. Francisco Goya painted it directly on the wall of his dining room, one of fourteen he covered the walls of his house with. The world would not learn they existed until decades after the artist's death. Today, it is known as Saturn devouring his son, and almost everything you have heard about it is not quite true. In February 1819, Goya, now 72, bought a small house on the outskirts of Madrid. The house already had a nickname, Quinta del Sordo, the house of the deaf man, after its Goya lived there in self-imposed exile. In the house with him were only his housekeeper and companion, Leocadia Weiss, and there, on the walls of that home, he began painting directly onto the plaster. Fourteen works, with no titles and no audience, Judith beheading Holofernes, Leocadia in a black veil, Witch's Sabbath, a dog drowning in a golden void, and on the wall, Goya saw every time he sat down to eat Saturn. Art historian Fred Licht would later call the black paintings as hermetically private, a body of work, as anything in the history of Western art. Goya left no sketches, no letters. The titles were added later by his friend, the painter Antonio Brugada, in the posthumous inventory. The paintings themselves were not shown to the public for half a century, and to understand what happened in that house, we have to go back 26 years earlier, to 1793. Goya was 46, a court painter, famous, and then, suddenly, he fell gravely ill. The illness was so strange, that even today, there is no definitive diagnosis. Syphilis, polio, Meniere's disease doctors still debate what exactly happened to him. Goya heard a constant roar and ringing in his head. He could not keep his balance. He suffered fainting spells and episodes of vision loss. The worst symptoms gradually faded. One remained forever. He went deaf. Deafness is not just the absence of sound. It is when the outside world falls silent, and the inner world grows louder, and everything a person carries inside them is left without a counterweight. Nearly 30 years later, everything that had been building inside Goya for years would burst out not in words, but in paint on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. In 1867, the French critic Charles Uriart climbed into that house and first described the black paintings to the wider public. He wrote, I confess, Goya could not have used a brush for these murals. He must have worked with a palette knife and his own fingers to create these monsters of a diseased imagination. That line created a myth that still survives today. That old Goya, in a fit of madness, smeared black paint onto the wall with his fingers like a child or a lunatic. A beautiful legend, but an inaccurate one. Goya did use a palette knife, but many of the brush strokes were laid down with a brush carefully and deliberately. He intentionally applied thick, impasto layers, nearly half a century before the French Impressionists. In other words, Saturn was not the product of madness, Goya painted it in full awareness. This figure has a name, and that name leads into one of the most brutal myths in Greek mythology. Cronus, the youngest of the Titans, the ancient gods, overthrew his father, Uranus, the god of the sky, and took his place. Then a prophecy warned him that his own son would overthrow him, just as he had overthrown his father. So Cronus began swallowing each of his newborn children alive. Only one was saved, Zeus. Zeus grew up and overthrew Cronus. The prophecy came true. The Romans renamed him Saturn and made him the god of time, sowing, and harvest. The name Cronus also sounds like the Greek word chronos, time. That is why, in Western tradition, Saturn has always stood for old age devouring youth, time devouring the lives it gives. Goya was not the first artist to take on this subject. Two hundred years before him, Peter Paul Rubens had already painted Saturn devouring his son. That painting hung in the Royal Collection in Madrid, where Goya, as a court painter, had full access to it. He knew it so well that he even made his own preparatory drawing, clearly inspired by Rubens. Rubens' Saturn stands on clouds against a starry blue sky. In one hand he holds a staff, a traditional attribute of the god of time. In the other, a baby, which he bites into like, as critic Wyndham Lewis put it, a stout Flemish burger bending over a roast goose. It is an illustration of the myth, literature translated into paint. Goya has no clouds, no stars, no staff, only blackness, as if it were rising from the bottom of consciousness. Saturn seems not to be painted on this darkness, but to emerge from it. No cosmology, no irony, only the act itself, stripped bare. And here the great strangeness begins. Look at the body and Saturn's arms. The head is gone, already bitten off. The left arm has been torn away at the shoulder. But what stands out are the hips, the rounded buttocks, the slender legs. Art historian John Giuffalo was the first to point this out. Saturn's victim is not a man, but an adult woman, and she is no longer resisting. In the myth, Cronus devours his sons. In Goya's own drawing and in Rubens's painting, they are boys children still alive, still struggling. But in the Quinta del Sordo version, Giuffalo argues everything is different. The overall feeling of the painting, in his view, is rage and insatiable lust. Not the horror of fatherhood. And Saturn has a detail between his legs that makes that interpretation literal, a bodily sign of desire, which a later restoration tried to awkwardly cover up. As Giuffalo writes, this is the myth reduced to its cruelest essence. But Saturn had another face. Goya was a father who outlived almost all of his children. Only one survived, his son Javier. Could that be where this image of a god devouring his own child came from? Perhaps. And yet Goya painted something far darker than the myth requires. There is, however, something in the image of Saturn that is rarely discussed. For centuries, Saturn was associated with a very specific type, the destructive artistic genius. The connection is older than it seems. In ancient medicine, human nature was governed by four humors. An excess of black bile produced melancholy, but not only in the sense of sadness. In a text attributed to Aristotle, that same bile was also responsible for inspiration, the same fluid depression, and genius. That is where the famous formula comes from. All those who have become eminent in philosophy, in politics, in poetry, or in the arts are clearly melancholic. Plato saw this madness as a divine gift. But Saturnine genius also had a dark side. The artist, as a child of Saturn, was not considered an ordinary person, and so ordinary rules did not apply to him, neither artistic nor moral ones. Talent, isolation, and self-destruction were seen as signs of the same nature. In 1514, Albrecht Dürer created the engraving Melancholia I, a winged figure frozen in a state of creative paralysis. Art historians call it a spiritual self-portrait of the artist. And 300 years later, on the wall of the house in the Quinta del Sordo, another figure would appear. Ciofalo asks, Isn't Goya painting the same kind of self-portrait here, only without the mask? Rage. Lust. Total freedom from morality. The Prado Museum, which now houses the painting, offers a different reading. Saturn, it says, may represent a human feeling as simple and terrible as the fear of losing power. To understand where that fear comes from, we need to go back to one night. May 2, 1808. The Piedmontese Piedmont rose up against Napoleon's occupying troops. That same night, and in the early hours of May 3, French firing squads led the detained civilians up to the hill of Principe Pio and executed them without trial. Six years later, Goya would paint the 3rd of May, 1808, a work that changed the way Europe portrayed war. Before Goya, war in art was a heroic spectacle, mounted generals, waving flags. After Goya, it became what it remains to this day, slaughter. In Goya's painting, the victims have faces, the executioners have only a row of rifles. After 1808, after the War of Independence, after the return of Ferdinand VII's absolutist regime and the Inquisition, Goya began keeping his most honest works to himself. The Disasters of War was never published in his lifetime. The black paintings were not made for the public, but for himself. Saturn devouring his son is the state devouring its citizens. Power, terrified of losing the throne, destroying its heirs. Cronus turning into Ferdinand or into any father willing to eat his own children just to prolong himself. The painting we see today in the Prado is not exactly the same as the one that once hung in Goya's dining room. Between 1874 and 1878, restorer Salvador Martinez Cubils removed the paintings from the walls and transferred them to canvas. The transfer badly damaged the paint layer, but shortly before that, photographer Juan Laurent had managed to photograph the black paintings directly on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. When art historian Nigel Glendinning compared those photographs with the painting's current condition, this became clear. The restorer changed a lot. A rounded knee became a flat patch. A sharp stroke along the right thigh disappeared. The genitals were repainted. The eyelids and pupils were altered. The gaze became less ferocious. In the end, the horror Goya built into the Prado version was softened. And yet, looking at Saturn today, it is impossible to shake the feeling that we are peeking at something never meant for our eyes. This is not a painting in the usual sense. It is a page from a diary no one was supposed to read. A confession written by a deaf man without words. If you're into the secrets of paintings and the hidden meanings behind them, subscribe. See you in the next episode.