Saturn in the history of painting
Saturn has been painted for some two thousand years in three main guises: the Roman god of the harvest, veiled and carrying a sickle; the cruel father who devours his children, culminating in Rubens and Goya; and, after the telescope, the ringed planet that became the emblem of space art. Between them runs a fourth figure, Saturn as Time and as the planet of melancholy, which shaped Renaissance allegory.
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Antiquity: the veiled god with a sickle
Roman images of Saturn are relatively rare and sober. The god appears as a mature, bearded man, his head covered by a fold of his cloak, holding a sickle or pruning knife (falx). The veil was a fixed feature of his images (curiously, his worshippers sacrificed bare-headed, in the Greek manner), while the sickle recalled his role as god of sowing and the harvest, as well as the myth of the castration of Uranus. A fresco from Pompeii, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, shows him in this form. Roman coins also carry his bust with the sickle. For the god himself and his temple, see Saturn, the Roman god and the Temple of Saturn.
The Middle Ages: the planet and its children
In medieval manuscripts Saturn is above all a planet, the slowest and coldest of the seven, ruling old age, lead and melancholy. Artists show him as an old man, often lame, sometimes with a crutch or wooden leg, holding a sickle or spade, occasionally in the act of eating a child. From the fifteenth century, the series of the "Children of the Planets" became popular, notably in German manuscripts and prints such as the Housebook (c. 1480) and later woodcuts by Georg Pencz: under Saturn riding his chariot appear his "children", the people his influence was believed to govern, namely peasants ploughing, beggars, cripples, prisoners in the stocks and gravediggers. These images are a visual summary of astrological beliefs and of the link between Saturn and lead.
Renaissance and Baroque: myth, Time and melancholy
The Renaissance revived the classical myths. In Florence, Giorgio Vasari and Cristofano Gherardi painted The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn (c. 1560) on a ceiling of the Palazzo Vecchio. At the same time, Saturn merged with the figure of Time, partly through the confusion between Kronos and chronos: the old man with sickle, wings and hourglass who reveals Truth, clips the wings of Love or destroys beauty. Bronzino's Allegory with Venus and Cupid (c. 1545, National Gallery, London) includes such a Father Time; Nicolas Poussin's A Dance to the Music of Time (c. 1634–1636, Wallace Collection) has him play the lyre; Pierre Mignard painted Time Clipping the Wings of Love in the late seventeenth century.
Saturn also governed the melancholic temperament, rehabilitated by Marsilio Ficino as the mark of genius. Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I (1514), with its brooding winged figure, magic square and tools left idle, is the most famous image of this Saturnine melancholy, even though Saturn himself does not appear in it.
The theme of the devouring father reached its Baroque climax with Rubens's Saturn (1636–1638), painted for Philip IV, in which three stars above the god recall Galileo's 1610 observation of a "triple" planet.
Goya: the image turned inside out
Around 1819–1823 Francisco de Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son on a wall of his house near Madrid, as part of the Black Paintings. He kept the subject but removed its classical apparatus: no scythe, no sky, no narrative, only a frantic figure in darkness. The work broke with allegory and became one of the founding images of modern art, interpreted in political, existential and psychological terms.
The planet in art: from drawings to space art
Once Christiaan Huygens explained the rings in 1659, Saturn became the most recognizable object in the sky, and astronomers became its first illustrators. In the 1870s the French artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot made large pastel drawings of Saturn and its rings from telescopic observation, later published as chromolithographs (1881–1882). In the twentieth century, the French astronomer Lucien Rudaux and above all the American Chesley Bonestell invented space art: Bonestell's views of Saturn seen from its moons, published in Life magazine in 1944, with the ringed planet hanging above a rocky horizon on Titan, inspired a generation of astronomers and filmmakers. Since then real images from Voyager and Cassini have joined the tradition; see famous photos of Saturn.
FAQ
How is Saturn usually depicted in art?
As an old bearded man holding a sickle or scythe, often with a veiled head in Roman art, sometimes lame or with a crutch in medieval art, and frequently devouring a child. From the Renaissance he also lends his features to Father Time with an hourglass.
What is the most famous painting of Saturn?
Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1819–1823), in the Prado, is by far the most famous. Rubens's Saturn (1636–1638), in the same museum, is the most important earlier version.
Why does Saturn hold a sickle?
He was a Roman god of sowing and the harvest, and in the Greek myth Cronus used a sickle to castrate his father Uranus. The sickle later became the scythe of Time and of Death.
Who first painted the planet Saturn with its rings?
Astronomers drew it first, from Huygens's diagrams in the 1650s onwards. As an artistic subject, it was popularized by astronomical illustrators such as Trouvelot in the 1870s and by space artists such as Chesley Bonestell in the 1940s.
Sources
- Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, Thomas Nelson, 1964
- Museo del Prado, records for Rubens's and Goya's Saturn
- Christiaan Huygens, Systema Saturnium, 1659
- Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III, The Art of Chesley Bonestell, Paper Tiger, 2001