Kronos (Cronus) devoured his children one by one in order to ensure that none of them should deprive him of his dominance of the entire world. According to Greek mythology Kronos was the youngest son of heaven, Uranus, and earth, Gaia. However, Gaia frightened Kronos by prophesying that one of his children would rob him of power. To Kronos, the solution was to swallow them. Nevertheless, Gaia managed to cheat him on one occasion. When his son Zeus was born, she took a stone and wrapped it in swaddling clothes. The result was that Kronos swallowed the stone instead of Zeus. And thus the way was open for the prophecy to be fulfilled. Zeus overthrew Kronos’s rule and assumed power over the world himself.
Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio writes Saturnus on this print. But the child being swallowed shows that Caraglio was working with a cross between the Roman god Saturn and the Greek god Kronos. The Romans saw Kronos as a counterpiece to their own Saturn. However, it should be remembered that Saturn was an early Roman god of agriculture. And traditionally, the Romans portrayed Saturn holding a sickle. Caraglio has interpreted this tradition quite freely and replaced the sickle with a scythe, an implement typically used in figurative representations of death.
