Cronus2.0010_Heemskerck

Maarten van Heemskerck, 1498-1574, engraved by Harmen Jansz. Muller, 1538/39-1617, after Heemskerck "Melancholici" (The Melancholic Temperment), plate 3 from the series of Four Temperments, 1566 engraving printed on paper; Yale Art Gallery, Duffy Study Room, Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901 Fund, acc. no. 2012.31.1.3; British Museum, no. 1872,1109.864.

Cronus or "Saturnus", identified by his sickle and infantigestion, presides in the celestial sphere over human suffering and toil, people of a melancholic disposition — scientists, astronomers, geographers (mensores terrae), suicides, and the true children of Saturn who work the landscape. The caption included in the Yale image states in Latin "Mensores terrae, vates Saturnus adoptat / Falciger, et quibus est sana nulla uncia mentis." (Saturn the Scythebearer adopts geometers, bards, and those who have not a single sane thought in their head. — RTM)

"The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris (1148) gives a striking reformulation of the [Cronus] myth: the planet S[aturn] is an all-destroying Reaper which destroys all that blooms and abhors all that is created. Arabic sources ... report S[aturn]'sassociation with the effects of 'black bile' (melancholia), turning the 'Children of Saturn' born under its sign into gloomy, morbid brooders and outsiders, who thus become suicides, outlaws, paupers and criminals — but also profound thinkers. Maarten van Heemskerck provided and illustration of this effect that is as exemplary as it is harrowing." (F. Bezner, p. 200)

See E. Panofsky, "Saturn," in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).

F. Bezner, s.v. "Cronus" in The Reception of Myth and Mythology, ed. by M. Moog-Grünewald, Brill's New Pauly, Supplements, 4 (2010).

Veldman, Ilja M. 1980. “Seasons, Planets and Temperaments in the Work of Maarten van Heemskerck Cosmo-Astrological Allegory in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Prints.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 11.3/4: 149–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/3780568.