What Did Goya Paint

Goya and Redon Francisco Goya was an 18th-19th century Spanish painter and printmaker. Odilon Redon was a 19th-20th century painter and printmaker. The two artists, though separated by a century, share a similar style and perspective. Goya lived through the Romantic-Enlightenment era and saw the unraveling of society on the Continent as the Old World values were swept away be Enlightenment philosophy and Romantic dreams.

Redon lived to reflect the aftermath of that era: his symbolist paintings show a world that is half-mad, yet totally focused on itself and its grandiose ideas. Together, Goya and Redon cover three centuries of thought and activity in Europe. Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1819-1823) and Redon’s The Smiling Spider (1887) both show strangeness in the extreme and depict a frightening aspect of the world that is at once nightmarish and bizarrely humorous.

This paper will provide an analysis of Goya’s and Redon’s respective works. Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son shows Saturn, the Roman god, who ate his children because he feared they would overthrow him. It is a cruel and grisly subject, but one that Goya felt reflected the world in which he lived where so much fighting, violence, and bloodshed was overwhelming Europe.

The Protestant Revolution had led to wars (Laux); the French Revolution had led to wars (Holsti); Napoleon had invaded country after country, and the Spanish Inquisition was trying to root out crypto Jews (Elliot; Roth). In short, there was carnage everywhere, much of it being committed by those in power towards those who were innocent and defenseless. In other words, the world in Europe very much reflected the story of Saturn eating his own children so that they would not take power from him (Cunninghma, Reich).

The painting is an oil mural transferred to canvas and is 56 in x 32 in. It is quite large to look at, which is appropriate given the immense monstrosity that is its subject. Saturn is depicted like a wild beast of an old man—naked and crazed, his eyes wide with terror as he bites the head off one of his children. Saturn does not appear like a rational man or a man who has anyone’s best interests at heart.

The look of terror in his eyes reflects the animalistic terror in his posture. He is crouched as though expecting to receive a blow from any direction at any one minute. To look the subject in the face is to feel like one is looking a cornered, frightened but vicious dog in the face. Saturn is lashing out in the only way he knows how to protect himself—eating those whom he fears. The scene is cast in dark colors.

Saturn’s long gray hair, which should be a reflection of wisdom and serenity, is tussled about as though there were a tempest in Saturn’s mind. He is eating into his nude babe as though the child were a steak sandwich. The scene is gruesome—yet humorous because Saturn is the emblem of reckless insecurity. The subject would make a surreal black comedy in the modern age under astute direction of capable artists.

In its own age, it reflected the grizzly manner in which authority was eating its children of the state out of fear of being overthrown. Licht has noted that Goya’s painting is “essential to our understanding of the human condition in modern times, just as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is essential to understanding the tenor of the 16th century” (71). Redon’s Smiling Spider is similar in its bizarreness.

The spider has ten legs—two more than the typical spider (so right away it is recognized as something of an anomaly and freak of nature). It also has a black fuzzy body that is round. A smiling face appears on it as well, which is very incongruous with what is found in nature. Spiders are naturally eerie and frightening to most people, yet here is the late 19th century artist depicting a spider as a friendly, happy creature that one might pet and dance with.

Indeed, the spider appears to be dancing a happy jig with his legs. Below the spider and to the right of the print comes the light that illuminates the scene. Above and behind the spider to the left is shadow. The spider thus serves as the border between the light and the dark. Its form, which should be menacing, is rather jovial. Its face, which should be animalistic is rather humanistic.

The blending and blurring of features and qualities in the picture shows that Redon was reflecting the surreal nature of the 19th century, where nothing was what it seemed—and as the Baltimore Museum of Art notes, “it is the recognition of our humanity in these strange hybrid creatures - the goofy, toothy grin on a fuzzy spider - that makes them so appealing and repellant at the same time.” The blend of realism and symbolism lends the print its menace and the interpretation is really up to the viewer.

Redon himself believed it to be a “synthesis of nightmares and dreams” (2). The mystery of work is bound up in the mystery of life and the world moving into the hyper-real of the 20th century (Redon, Werner). In conclusion, Goya and Redon produced some of the most memorably frightening works of the modern era. Goya’s Saturn and Redon’s Spider represent the surreal, the comic-tragic, the gruesome, the horrific, the nightmarish, and the absurdly humorous. There.