Baroque gilded bronze from the middle of the XVII

This remarkable gilded bronze represents the Greek deity Cronos (Saturn for the Romans), devouring one of his children. Son of the primordial gods Gaia and Uranus, the titan Cronos turns against his father to free his brothers and sisters that the latter, who feared to be destroyed by his offspring, had locked in the bowels of the earth. Following this episode, Cronos became their king and took his sister Rhea as wife. But soon, it engages in a reign as tyrannical as the previous one. Having been warned that one of his own children would destroy him, in the same way that he himself had dethroned his father, he decided to devour them one by one, from birth. Thus, he engulfed Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon. The last born, Zeus, is saved by his mother through a subterfuge and will finish fulfilling the prophecy by dethroning the titan. Confused over the centuries with the deity Chronos, personification of time, the modern artists make it the incarnation of the concept of eternal return (a historical cycle repeating itself tirelessly) and the time that devours everything. Cronos is then represented as on our bronze with the attributes of time, aging, with wings. Often accompanied by a sickle, the weapon with which he wounded his father Uranus and symbol of human lives mowed by death, it is undoubtedly the object that held our character in his right hand. The style, expressiveness and great theatricality of this work place us in the Italian context of the seventeenth century particullary Rome and the Bernini context .