Bonestell's Saturn

 

The most famous of Bonestell's works are his pictures of Saturn, many of which show the planet as if from one of its many moons: ‘his paintings of Saturn,’ say John Grant and Peter Nicholls, ‘as seen from the surfaces of its moons are understandably regarded as classics, [holding] great beauty and drama in their stillness and depth.’ They are, as with all Bonestell's work, compositionally poised, precisely worked, clear and marvellous. Some place Saturn larger, some smaller. Above is ‘Saturn Viewed from Titan’ (1952: oil on board. 18.25 x 23 in), in which the planet is in shade, a thin crescent with two spurs of light reflected along its rings: appearing spectral, like a ghost of itself. Here, bulkier and more impressively physical, is ‘Saturn as Seen from Mimas’ (1944)

This image was used as the cover art for Ron Miller's The Art of Chesley Bonestell (2001)

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What is it about Saturn that makes it the most popular planet? Its rings (though other planets in our solar system have rings), a grooved shining halo that sanctifies the layered blonde, tan and nitrogen hues of the world's face. 

A Hubble image of Saturn

Image of Saturn taken by Cassini/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute  

The size of Saturn, and its ringedness: its golden sheen. The rings, we know, are not solid; billions of crumbs and chunks of ice in orbital synchronisation. But they looks solid: as though you could drive your car along them, as in the 1906 British silent short film, The ‘?’ Motorist. The look like a pale form of rainbow, one that would, for an observer within Saturn's atmosphere, be permanently arc-ing en ceil: as in this Bonestell canvas:

Alan Osborne's recent villanelle ‘Saturn’ (2024) opens:

When Saturn and his choking rings complete their toils,
Malign, diseased senescence, smirking au revoir,
Are we to shortly shuffle off these mortal coils?

The wheel of time implodes, its clockwork spring uncoils.
The immanentized eschaton begins in war
As Saturn and his choking rings complete their toils.

(I'm not persuaded by the revoir/war rhyme, and ‘to shortly shuffle off’ is a split-infinitive, but it's not a bad poem). The work's epigraph is a quotation from Michael Ward: “According to medieval thought, the worst planet was Saturn, sponsor of death, destruction, darkness, and disaster.” But I don't think this older reputation of the Roman god, devouring his own son, or the malign avatar of old-age decay and dying, has carried-through to the modern age, with its capturing of the actual planet in so many beautiful astronomical and space-probe images. The planet's rings aren't ‘choking’, I'd say: they swing round the body of the pale-gold planet at a distance, a mystic circle woven thrice (in fact there are thousands of bands and individual rings, within six main bandings). The slow, trudging crescendo of Holst's ‘Saturn: the Bringer of Old Age’ (part of his Planets suite, 1918) communicates inevitability, the approach of senescence, a processional that builds to a clangorous climax of brass, and then fades away into the further depths of space: beautiful and numinous.