Kronos

Various interpretations of the paintings have been offered: the conflict between youth and old age, time as the devourer of all things, and also, more specifically, in Goya’s version, an allegory of the situation in Spain.

What do you think?


Very eloquinty put. Picasso, sir? Why, it is believed that he may have painted some 58 recreations of Las Meninas.

What I was wondering is what the gentleman from Wales makes of it? Cronos, sir.


I like the way the gentleman thinks. Still, look at the expression on the titan’s face. Many of the figures of the Black Paintings share the same expressive facial characteristics: staring eyes, revealing the whites at the top and the pupils below (indication of terror or extreme intensity---like the eye-rolling of a wild horse [link]), as well as open or eating mouths.

Rose-Marie and Reiner Hagen have it that "open mouths were---and are still---considered taboo, both in society and, for a long time, in art...probably because the lips and mouth mark the start of the digestive tract---a part of the human body that remains anonymous...a part that we share with animals. To look down the throat is to remember that our intellectual existence, which we consider our real one, is dependent upon organs and instinctual drives that we cannot control and at whose mercy we lie."

I have heard it said that the painting may have originally portrayed the titan with a partially erect penis. But, if ever present, that alleged missing "part," was lost due to the deterioration of the mural over time or during the transfer to canvas; in the picture today the area around the titan’s groin is indistinct. They say it may have been overpainted deliberately before the picture was put on public display.

Hm … And what have we here? Would that be a Rubens or a Goya?



What do you think, sir? Much ado about nothing, if you ask me. I mean, it’s only sex, isn’t it? But, it might of course depend on what the definition of is is.


Indeed... Human nature, sir.

Look at the engravings.

Look at the portraits.

Goya was by no mean a caricaturist. A caricaturist is someone who laughs at other people’s expense, but Goya gibes as much at himself as he does at others. Nobody is spared: the coquettes and their suitors (the duchess of Alba and Goya), the monks and their flocks, the aristocrats and their servants. His paintings may be hard and brutal but there is there, at the same time, an immense and overflowing sorrow for mankind, a sorrow that embraces victims and torturers alike, in its compassion, and which extends beyond just simply the human condition. Let's just call it the condition---for this is The Wulfshead and it wouldn't do to sound too human-centric in our understanding.