Demented and Schizo Parents

I'm watching the HBO series Rome again, and I forgot how much I absolute LOVE it. The sets are gorgeous...I'm painting all the major rooms of my house al buon fresco. And it makes me want to get back into historical fiction writing. Atia is probably my favorite...she's a grossly unorthodox mother and a diabolical bitch in general.

SO. I'm using that last bit to segue into my art topic for today: Demented and Schizo Parents. Goya's painting of Saturn Devouring His Son is a pretty well known illustrative example of this subject, and everyone knows the basic story from Hesiod...Cronus (Saturn in the Roman pantheon) was the head Titan who ate his children (a little over half of the Olympian crew) because he thought it would prevent them from taking over his turf (rational, absolutely mental, but rational). But baby Zeus was destined to dethrone his presumptuous dad, and somehow he forced Cronus to regurgitate his siblings. Hmm.

All of the paintings depicting this episode of the Theogony never portray Saturn popping the corpora whole...they alway show maniacal eyes and mouths wrenched into screwy shapes of taboo famine, ragged chunks and limbs missing from fragmentary deities in pain.

*sigh* Artists are so romantic.

And an audience loves the macabre and the grotesque...it gives us something to gauge beauty by.

But this...the Rubens Saturn. Dis. Tur. Bing. Cruelty and beauty combined. That Saturn is old and looks like he has a cane and the victim is a toddler makes it even worse. Like Choderlos de Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses, or Cruel Intentions.

To cite Umberto Eco in his History of Beauty, "the beauty of bodies no longer has any spiritual connotation [with unfettered reason]; all it expresses is the cruel pleasure of the torturer or the torments of the victim, stripped of any moral frills."