Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Cronus.
The gallery
Saturn Devouring His Son
Francisco Goya, 1819–1823
One of Goya's Black Paintings, executed directly on the walls of his house outside Madrid and later transferred to canvas. It shows the Titan with nightmarish intensity, devouring one of his children to forestall the prophecy that a son would overthrow him. Now in the Museo del Prado, it has become the defining modern image of Cronus.
Saturn Devouring His Son
Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
A Baroque oil painting commissioned for the Torre de la Parada, the Spanish royal hunting lodge. Rubens depicts Saturn tearing into his infant son beneath his scythe, rendering the myth with visceral naturalism. The work hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid and anticipates Goya's later treatment of the same subject.
The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn
Giorgio Vasari & Cristofano Gherardi, c. 1560
An oil-on-panel ceiling painting from the Sala degli Elementi of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. It depicts the pivotal act of divine succession in Hesiod's Theogony: Cronus castrating his father Uranus, the sky, with the adamantine sickle.
On screen
In play
Percy Jackson & the Olympians
Rick Riordan
Riordan's series casts Kronos as the rising Titan lord — the swallowed-children myth rewritten as a demigod war against Time's king.
The Last Olympian
Rick Riordan
The series climax brings Kronos into Luke's body for the siege of Olympus — Cronus as the final boss of a children's epic.
God of War III
Santa Monica Studio
Kratos climbs and kills the colossal Titan Cronos in the desert of the lost — the child-swallower as a boss the size of a mountain.
Saturday
English Saturday descends from Latin dies Saturni — Cronus' Roman name still naming the seventh day of the week.
Saturnalia
Rome's midwinter festival of gift-giving and role-reversal honored Saturn — Cronus' Latin face as the Golden Age returned for a week.