Most masterpieces assume an audience, but Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son directly onto the dining room wall of his own farmhouse, with no patron, no title, and no explanation. This episode reconstructs the artist's dark final act: the 1792 fever that left him permanently deaf, the guerrilla warfare of the Peninsular War, the lingering terror of the Inquisition, and his 1819 purchase of the Quinta del Sordo, the Villa of the Deaf Man, named for a previous occupant.

We look at how he first decorated the house with bright scenes before painting over them between 1820 and 1823 with the 14 Black Paintings, six of them in the dining room. We compare his frenzied, bloody giant with the traditional myth of Cronus, his own 1796 chalk sketch, and Rubens's calculating Saturn, then weigh the interpretations: time devouring all things,  ...