Saturn Devoures One of His Sons

Author: Surya Stemerding

This previously unpublished drawing, an anonymous copy after a fresco by Polidoro da Caravaggio (1499-1543) and Maturino da Firenze (1490-1528) on the façade of Palazzo Milesi in Rome, was executed shortly before 1527. The decorations depict mythological scenes from the first years of the city of Rome. The scenes are positioned as friezes between the storeys, and individual figures, including Saturn/Cronus, appear between the windows on the first, second and third floors.^[1]

The drawing depicts the gruesome story of Saturn/Cronus, who devoured his own children in an attempt to prevent a prophecy from coming true. Like most sixteenth-century façade decorations, Polidoro and Maturino’s fresco has not survived centuries of exposure to the elements, but there are innumerable drawn copies of it.

There are other drawn copies of Polidoro’s Saturn in Paris, Florence, Chantilly, Cambridge (Mass.) and Windsor.^[2] The latter is a chalk drawing from the workshop of Carlo Maratti (1625-1713). There is a striking shadow of the angled handle of the scythe on the sun-drenched niche in four of the five copies, an aspect omitted from the drawings in Florence and Cambridge (Mass.).

Ravelli (1978) dated the drawing in Paris as the earliest of the copies, made not long after the original frescoes were completed. Given the type of watermark - an anchor in a circle with a six-pointed star - which also occurs in the large variant in archives in Lucca (c.1540-45) and in an Italian book of arms, the Insignia Venetorum nobilium of around 1550-55, the Rotterdam copy can be dated to around 1550-60.

The drawing was first attributed to Michelangelo (1475-1564) in Domela Nieuwenhuis’s collection and later given to Ugo da Carpi (c.1480-1532).^[3] The relationship to the fresco has not previously been remarked upon.