Most importantly, Saturn Devouring His Son, a horrific Romantic era painting, is not merely a mood painting or a documentary of a descent into madness. Rather it is ABOUT something. According to Robert Hughes' GOYA: "And in what sort of society would the fathers eat the young? Surely, one in which the old perceive the new as a deadly threat: a society so reactionary that “tradition,” imagined as the absolute reign of total authority, is worth murdering for.
In this way Goya’s Saturn may be meant to direct our gaze back to the values of Fernando VII and his loyalists, an incarnation of a revolution that ended by eating its children. He is, so to speak, Goya’s contemporary—the Exterminating Angel."
His whole book is passionately--not academically like Thomlinson's--argued towards presenting Goya (like Beethoven, like Shelley) as so profoundly rooted in his own age that he soars beyond it, smack dab into our own.