The Houses of Parliament, Sunset

Saturn Devouring His Son, painted between 1819 and 1823, is the most terrifying image in Western art and the centerpiece of Goya's Black Paintings - the 14 murals he painted directly onto the walls of his house outside Madrid. The painting depicts the Roman god Saturn, wild-eyed and raving, consuming the body of one of his children in an act of primal violence. Goya painted the Black Paintings for no audience but himself. Deaf, isolated, and politically disillusioned after the restoration of the Spanish monarchy, he covered the walls of his farmhouse with images of horror, madness, and despair. Saturn was painted above the door of the ground-floor dining room - a greeting that embodied the householder's darkest vision of existence. The painting's power lies in its refusal of allegory or distance. Where classical depictions of Saturn present the myth with rhetorical dignity, Goya shows the god in the grip of a compulsion he cannot control: his eyes bulging, his mouth gaping, his body hunched over his prey like a starving animal. The already half-consumed body transforms myth into visceral reality. Critics have read the image as an embodiment of the artist's rage at his own physical decline and at the political horrors of the age.

Saturn Devouring His Son is the founding image of artistic Expressionism. Goya's willingness to paint what he feared most - madness, violence, the collapse of reason - established the tradition of the artist as truth-teller that would influence Gericault, Ensor, Munch, Bacon, and every painter who found in art the means to confront the unacceptable.

This painting is Goya's final, irreversible break with the Enlightenment faith in reason and progress. Saturn, the god of time, devours his own children: every generation destroys what it creates, and no progress is permanent. Painted by a deaf old man on the wall of his house, it remains the most unflinching image of cosmic horror in Western art.