The Cultural Significance of Saturn and Its Rings

Saturn’s ring system became etched in the human imagination some time after the mid-1600s when Dutch mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens first illustrated the rings.4 He also was first to identify its moon Titan.5 However, in recent memory, it was Chesley Bonestell’s renderings of Saturn that brought the planet into the public purview. By training Bonestell was an ar­chitect, but he’s probably best known for the stunning paintings of Saturn published in May 1944 in LIFE magazine. The most famous and striking of these is titled “Saturn as Seen from Titan.” Readers were amazed by the suite of paintings that appeared in the May 29 issue, perhaps in part because the issue was largely dedicated to news and advertisements related to the war effort. Among 130 pages of news reports on American soldiers in Europe, war-themed ads, and largely black and white photos of troops, Bonestell’s realistic and full color renderings of Saturn lumbering in the sky of Titan transported readers into exotic and delightful planetary vistas.

Bonestell recounted how in 1905 he was inspired to paint the spectacularly ringed planet: “When I was seventeen, an important event occurred in determining my future career, although I little suspected it then.” Having once hiked with a friend to Lick Ob­servatory at the summit of Mount Hamilton, Bonestell recalled, “That night I saw for the first time the Moon through the 36-inch refractor, but most impressive and beautiful was Saturn through the 12-inch refractor. As soon as I got home I painted a picture of Saturn.”6 Although that painting was lost in the fires caused by the Great Earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco, Saturn had made a lasting impression on the young artist.

When nearly forty years later Bonestell submitted the series of paintings that included “Saturn as Seen from Titan” to the edi­tors of LIFE, they quickly agreed to publish them. Ron Miller and Frederick Durant explain: “No one had ever before seen such paintings—they looked exactly like snapshots taken by a National Geographic photographer (figure 5.2). For the first time, renderings of the planets made them look like real places and not mere ‘art­ists’ impressions.”7 Miller and Durant write that Carl Sagan main­tained “he didn’t know what other worlds looked like until he saw Bonestell’s paintings,” while science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke suggested that in a sense Bonestell had walked on the Moon long before Neil Armstrong and reportedly quipped, “Tranquility Base was established over Bonestell’s tracks and discarded squeezed-out paint tubes.”8

Wyn Wachhorst has explored why Bonestell’s famous painting “Saturn as Seen from Titan” is so compelling: “Since Titan is the only satellite in the Solar System with an atmosphere, the giant Saturn looms low in a dark blue sky like an alien ship, a thin,

gleaming crescent bisected by the glowing edge of its rings, afloat between jagged cliffs that jut from a frozen sea. . . . A hint of dawn lights the far horizon; and beyond a lofty pinnacle, out under the glow of the great crescent, lies a distant patch of noonday plain.” Among the other Bonestell paintings in the LIFE layout were imagined scenes of Saturn from its moons Phoebe, Iapetus, Mimas, and Dione. One depicted Saturn’s rings passing overhead from the perspective of the planet’s cloud tops. Wachhorst explains that the suite of paintings was intended to offer varying views of Saturn on approach from its outer moons.9

Though he painted numerous panoramas of planetary land­scapes ranging from Mercury to Pluto, Bonestell was aesthetically captivated by Saturn, a subject he repeatedly returned to through­out his life. He painted numerous iterations of Saturn from Titan and its other moons. In 1949, for instance, he completed paintings of Saturn from Dione, in which the full body of Saturn is glimpsed from the mouth of a cave. His panorama for the Griffith Observa­tory, completed in 1959, featured a prescient vision of the frozen landscape of Titan with Saturn low on the horizon. Throughout the 1960s, Bonestell reworked different views of Saturn from Titan, changing the lighting or subtly altering Titan’s landscape. In 1972, he completed two separate paintings of Saturn from Iapetus, as well as a painting of Saturn from Enceladus for Arthur C. Clarke’s book Beyond Jupiter. Bonestell returned to the subject of Saturn again and again, in various configurations, settings, and lighting.

All this from an architect whose work included contributions to the design of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the layout of the well-known Seventeen Mile Drive at Pebble Beach in Monterey, the Eagle gargoyles and art deco facade of the iconic Chrysler building in New York City, and the design of buildings for the Cal­ifornia Institute of Technology in Pasadena.10 He became the high­est paid special effects artist in Hollywood, working on films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Citizen Kane (1941). Bonestell’s turn to space art played out in popular magazines such as LIFE and Collier’s, and in films like Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), and Conquest of Space (1955). His work inspired generations to imagine the stark and beautiful plan­etary landscapes in our Solar System and in far-flung star systems of the galaxy. “Bonestell brought the edge of infinity out of the abstract and into the realm of direct experience,” comments Wach – horst.11 His paintings suggested planetary vistas human eyes had not yet seen, and sometimes included figures of astronauts dwarfed by a vast surrounding terrain. This was true of his painting of Sat­urn from Mimas in the LIFE layout, and of an iteration of Saturn from Titan completed in 1969, which situates three tiny astronauts on a cliff, looking out at a fully lit Saturn as one astronaut points to the rings.

Bonestell apparently learned the technique for rendering his realistic paintings from science illustrator Scriven Bolton while working in the 1920s at the Illustrated London News. Bolton, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, constructed plaster cast models of planetary landscapes, photographed them, and then painted in planets and stars.12 Working from this technique, Bon – estell would project light onto his plaster landscapes to get a sense of how sunlight and shadows might fall across terrain, and then painted based on photos of these lit scenes. This resulted in land­scapes that seemed reachable and tangible. His widely celebrated renderings “invited viewers into the possible planetary landscapes that exist on moons of the outer solar system. In Bonestell’s depic­tion, Titan’s landscape resembles that of the American Southwest or perhaps the craggy cliffs of the Rocky Mountains in winter. The deep blue of the sky recalls that of Earth.”13 Though such spectacular views from Titan may be unlikely given the moon’s hazy, methane-rich atmosphere, Bonestell was prescient in suggest­ing the sublime experience of standing on the shore of one world to view another in close proximity.

Wyn Wachhorst contends that Bonestell’s art purposely evokes “a kind of cosmic shoreline, a composite of stark and eerie beaches on the near edge of the starry deep,” and that the seashore is the “root metaphor” of Bonestell’s art, meant to evoke Earth’s hori­zon as the shoreline between Earth and outer space. Bonestell’s art reminds us that from Earth we stand “on the shore of the cosmic ocean, riding our wisp of blue and white like mites on a floating leaf, in the whorls and eddies of a great galactic reef.”14 Carl Sagan wrote in Pale Blue Dot that humans have from time immemorial been innately drawn to the horizon. Ancient Egyptians identified their god Horus with the Sun on the horizon and with the planet Saturn, thought to represent Horus the Bull.15 The Great Sphinx in Giza apparently was associated with Horus and specifically is ori­ented toward, and draws the eye to, the Eastern horizon.16 With­out question, Bonestell’s work inspired Sagan, whose first episode of the PBS series Cosmos was titled “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.”