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Saturnine Goya
‘Saturnine adj.
1 a of a sluggish gloomy temperament. b (of looks
etc.) dark and brooding.
2 archaic a of the metal lead. b Med. Of or
affected by lead-poisoning.’
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Image: Francisco Goya’s painting ‘Saturn
devouring one of his Children’.
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[Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary
1990]
Francisco Goya (1746-1828), the great
Spanish painter, made his own pigments by heating and mixing
lead ores.
S Colum Gilfillan (1889-1987), in his book, published
posthumously in 1990, Rome’s Ruin By Lead Poison, (Wenzel
Press), speculates as to the effect on painters of mixing their
lead based paints. He argues that Goya, who went through many
mental and physical breakdowns, may have been poisoned by his
paints. |
In Goya’s painting Saturn devouring one of his
Children, 1820-1823, which was painted on a wall of the artist’s
house, one is struck by the colours. The grays, yellows, whites and reds
were probably all mixed from lead ores. He could have obtained the red
pigments from litharge (PbO), a yellowish-red ore which changes to red
lead, minium, by heating it in air. Litharge also makes a yellow pigment
by using a different process. Another yellow pigment is made from lead
white paint. White lead mixed with lead acetate and heated produces a
grey paint.
It is indeed astounding, if the above is the case,
that Goya lived to the age of 82 albeit deaf and deranged.
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