r/ArtHistory • u/loeweljournals • 11h ago
News/Article OC - The Queer Horror Story Hidden in Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" (c. 1819-1823)
Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn devouring his son) (c. 1819-1823), one of Francisco de Goya’s darkest and most violent works within his collection titled the Black Paintings, represents a common theme seen in many households.
Painted directly onto the dining room walls of his private residence, the Quinta del Sordo, this mural strips away the idealized beauty of classical Roman myth to an animalistic yet domestic nightmare. This violence is driven by a prophecy: Saturn was foretold to be overthrown and replaced by one of his own kin (a son). Through paranoia of losing his absolute authority, he chose to devour each of his children at birth to outsmart fate and preserve his power.
Through a queer lens, the historical reality of the painting is not distant, but inside the walls of a modern family home, where heteronormative violence and the regulation of identity are both most intimately and aggressively enforced. The “prophecy” presents an allegory of the older generations' anxiety that children will grow up to challenge the traditional systems of the past.
The Panic of System Hyper-Surveillance
Goya replaces the magnificence of traditional mythological gods with realistic psychological horror. Take Saturn’s bulging eyes, for instance. His bulging eyes help to represent how Saturn knows that inevitably, the next generation will replace him, where his frantic stare represents the panic of heteronormative systems when realizing that they cannot change evolution in its entirety. Furthermore, his wide eyes represent the constant need to watch and monitor his children for any defiance of traditional roles.
Most jarring about his eyes is that Saturn fully realizes the horror of what he is doing, destroying his own bloodline to save his ego, mirroring how families choose to psychologically or socially “destroy” their queer children rather than to accept it as a threat to their family identity and the structures of the past.
Look at the light contrast between Saturn and his child compared to his background. Saturn is lit up as if a spotlight has “found” him in the complete void. In heteronormative households, such abuse, conversion, and silencing usually occur behind closed doors. Goya’s use of light here serves as a way to expose such violence and opens up the secrets of an externally normal-looking family home for the viewer to witness.
Destroying the Accepted
The most unsettling part of Goya’s masterpiece is perhaps the proportions of Saturn’s victim. In mythology, Saturn devours his children as newborns. However, Goya presents Saturn’s child rather as an adult, seen through the victim's rounded hips, wide thighs, and the length of his limbs. Goya’s artistic choice to do so represents the ability to actively destroy someone with an already formed identity, and one who can challenge, which a newborn cannot.
In a twist, as art historian John J. Ciofalo argued, the gender of the victim to be female, through such bodily proportions. By drawing a daughter instead of a son, the traditional political power myth is destroyed.
Because women weren’t able to inherit such a political position legally in ancient times, Saturn isn’t fighting a political opponent here. Instead, he is fighting for absolute domestic control, exterminating any body who defies the expectations of the patriarchal household.
— Feature from the Editorial Team at LÖWEL Journals (Vol. 1, No. 1), an independent youth-focused publication based on the intersection of fine arts and modern culture.
