Saturn 1638

Curator: It’s difficult to look at. What’s the emotional register, here? Horror? Grief? Editor: I see both, and I think that tension is the key to understanding this unsettling work. This is Peter Paul Rubens’ "Saturn," painted around 1636. It’s currently housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Rubens uses oil on canvas to depict the mythological figure devouring one of his own children. Curator: The iconography here is pretty straightforward, right? Saturn, or Kronos, eats his children to prevent them from usurping him, as he did his own father. Is it all just power and betrayal? Editor: The visual language speaks to so much more. The darkness of the background really isolates the figures. Saturn is often associated with melancholy, and the darkness here amplifies that. But notice also the astrological symbol right up top. Curator: Yes, three bright stars almost hidden behind the looming clouds. And I wonder about the public perception of the painting when it was new. We think of Rubens primarily as a court painter, celebrating wealth and power. Paintings like this could give an alternative perspective, if there were space and reason to. Editor: Exactly! We have a visceral representation of the fear of losing power, the lengths someone might go to in order to keep it. But look at the detail: the baby's open mouth in a silent scream. It evokes all kinds of pain - infanticide, lost potential, a perversion of fatherly love. This single symbol carries all of these. Curator: It definitely disrupts that typical image of Rubens’s art as purely celebratory. It's a really forceful reminder of the dark side of authority, one that resonates powerfully across centuries. Editor: I agree, it pulls at you. For me, Rubens uses this old myth and its familiar attributes to comment on eternal cycles of fear and grief. Curator: Thanks. It's interesting to reconsider it in this light, against the backdrop of his more widely known work. Editor: Indeed. It stays with you.