gothic_image

Gothic Image of the Month ....

A picture selected at random from my ever-growing collection gathered from the magical world of the Internet, or various books and learned tomes. It could be wonderful; could be crap. Whatever comes up next. That's what makes it interesting.

Collect the whole set! - You'll be lucky, I've got about 1500 clattering around.

March 2010 - Saturn Devouring One of His Children by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, 1820-23

Back to high art this month for one of the classic Gothic images. This hideous vision is one of the 'Black Paintings', horrible meditations on human frailty and cruelty daubed by the great Goya on the walls of his house during his internal exile in Madrid in the 1820s as he struggled with deafness and isolation, falling into a self-defined landscape of grim hopelessness. In fact, the painting has no title: the mythological name is a rationalisation of what is really just an inexplicable image of need, desperation, hatred, and insanity. According to Richard Davenport-Hines, it 'indicates one direction of Gothic excess after the French Revolution had forced the Gothic imagination beyond the gentilities of Ann Radcliffe and the camp of Horace Walpole'. Fred Licht, who Davenport-Hines quotes, goes further: in Saturn, 'Chaos is the origin and end of life. Madness is rendered in the distraught vocabulary of madness'.
In contrast to some of Goya's other images, I can't think of instances in which this has fed into wider visual culture. It seems too mad, too extreme, too violent to do anything constructive with; it also makes you feel very sorry for Goya, if this was the kind of thing going on in his head.