https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/ 17th Italy https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=146263556 146263556 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=150467538 150467538 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=138141278 138141278 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98954652 98954652 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=99908172 99908172 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98234861 98234861 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=99908171 99908171 See my essay on Caravaggio for a discussion of Catholic Counter-Reformation values of conversion, faith, inner vision, "Jewish" blindness, and homoerotic mystical marriage. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=66830264 66830264 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98234862 98234862 The brutal torturing and killing of those foolish enough to defy the gods was a common mythological example of seventeenth-century absolutist values. Since Caravaggio, figures upside down with their heads emerging toward the viewer were a common device in Baroque art. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=97810068 97810068 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100373996 100373996 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100622838 100622838 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=99404453 99404453 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98956261 98956261 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98956260 98956260 The bride's chest featured a Triumph of Ceres. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98576790 98576790 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100086587 100086587 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100086588 100086588 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100086590 100086590 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=122140184 122140184 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577420 140577420 Barberini Palace, Rome taken with a 5 megapixel camera many years ago but better than nothing - these frescoes are not easy to come by. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577430 140577430 Barberini Palace, Rome taken with a 5 megapixel camera many years ago but better than nothing - these frescoes are not easy to come by. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577423 140577423 Barberini Palace, Rome https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577428 140577428 Among other things, bees were known since classical antiquity as natural emblems of monarchy, hierarchical order, military power and empire building, and celestial ascent. Here the bees symbolize the perfect monarchy of the Catholic church headed by the pope, the global empire of the Roman Catholic church in an age of missionary piety, and the eternal, celestial fame of Urban VIII written in the stars. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577429 140577429 detail of Cortona's Triumph of the Barberini, ceiling, Palazzo Barberini, Rome https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=106325015 106325015 Cortona, Hercules Defeating the Harpies, Palazzo Barberini / Paired with Minerva Defeating the Giants, this fresco offers another allegory of Barberini virtue and triumph, papal supremacy, and the heroic victory of the Roman Catholic Church over the twin ?monsters? of Protestant heresy and Islam. The Turkish dragon or beast was a common slur everywhere in Christian Europe. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577422 140577422 In Virgil?s Aeneid, Venus persuades Vulcan to forge the armor of her son, Aeneas, the Trojan prince. Well armored and protected by divine providence, Aeneas guides the defeated Trojan empire on a long journey which ends on the shores of Italy. Intermarried with locals, the Trojans become Latins and found the greatest empire in all history: Rome. If Venus is the mother of Rome, Aeneas is the half-divine, royal hero whose destiny to help found the greatest empire is forecast in the stars. In Christian terms, the forecasting of the glorious rise of Rome under Divine Providence also signals the rise of the Roman Catholic church to global supremacy and its well-armored victory over its enemies. By the same token, the arming of the Trojan ruler allegorizes the Aeneas-like power of the divinely-guided and empowered papacy in general, and that of Urban VIII in particular. This fresco relates closely to the two scenes of conquest nearby: Hercules Defeating the Harpy and Minerva Defeating the Giants. The Forge of Vulcan, already used in Homer to allegorize the divine destiny of the Greeks and the invincible power of Achilles, son of Thetis, emerged as a theme in sixteenth-century Italian court art to allegorize the glorious power of the aristocracy as a military class. At the same time, high nobles had elaborate, ceremonial armor made for public occasions and for countless portraits. In court portraits, the vogue for armor lasted until the mid seventeenth-century when elegant clothing and ?feminine? grace replaced ?masculine? metal. In the complex mythological allegory of Renaissance culture, the Forge of Vulcan also referenced the greatest artist among the Gods. As such, it was also used to allegorize Renaissance and Baroque artistic ingenuity, especially in one of the most ingenious and complicated mythological paintings ever conceived in its day. Cortona?s ceiling in the Barberini Palace was the first mythological decoration so complex as to come with its own printed guidebook explaining the allegories. In the Forge of Vulcan, one admires the divine artistry of Vulcan and, more importantly, the master artist responsible for the scene, Pietro da Cortona. One also admires the divine mind of the patron at a time when writers and artists frequently credited all of their inventions to the mind of the patron. In this case, the papal patron was a highly educated humanist poet who probably played a vital role in selecting the subjects so creatively visualized by Cortona. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577421 140577421 Barberini Palace, Rome https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577424 140577424 The defeat of the giants by the gods appears toward the beginning of Ovid?s Metamorphoses as an allegory of Augustan imperial victory and power. A staple of later Roman imperial conquest, it reemerged as a subject in sixteenth-century Italian art , most notably in the Palazzo del Te outside Mantua and in the Palazzo Doria in Genoa. Painted on the ceiling of a papal palace during the Counter-Reformation, Cortona?s allegorizes the victory of Roman Catholicism over its twin enemies of heresy and Islam. (In the early 1570s, Pope Gregory XIII had already commissioned a fresco cycle from Vasari for the Sala Regia which paired these two defeated foes of Catholic piety.) Renaissance depictions of the Battle Between the Gods and Giants usually showed all of the gods defeating a crown of giants. By giving the victory to Minerva, the armored goddess of chastity and wisdom, Cortona allowed paper power, conquest, and violence to appear in a more softened, benevolent form while using the giants to demonize the two principal enemies facing the Roman Catholic Church in the early seventeenth: Protestants and Muslim Turks. The armed female figure destroying falling giants is not that different from the armed angel killing French Protestants on the back of the papal medallion of Gregory XIII commemorating the slaughter of the Huguenots in 1572. Minerva vanquishing the giants also recalls the many images of a triumphant Mary which circulated through Catholic art after 1590 in a variety of subjects including the Ascension of the Virgin, the Madonna in Glory, the Coronation of the Virgin, the Madonna as Woman of the Apocalypse, and the Immaculate Conception. In a print by the Flemish artist, Wierix, Mary Triumphs over Heresy while below, Judith cuts off the head of Holofernes. Putting a benevolent, feminine face on violence and conquest goes back to ancient Roman political imagery ? with Minerva as the perfect example of military power cloaked in wise and virtuous femininity. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577431 140577431 Barberini Palace, Rome https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577425 140577425 Barberini Palace, Rome https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577426 140577426 Barberini Palace, Rome https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577427 140577427 1. Rape of the Sabines 1628-9, Rome, Capitoline Museum During the 1620's, Cortona worked for the Sacchetti family, painting frescos in their villa at Castel Fusano and a series of oil paintings depicting scenes from classical history and mythology including the Rape of the Sabines, a pendant to the Sacrifice of Polyxena painted a little earlier. The more statuesque, classical Baroque style of Annibale Carracci gives way here to a new Venetian colorism and atmospheric drama, a more asymmetrical composition, and the submersion of parts within a new aesthetic totality of the High Baroque. At the same time, Cortona singled out three pairs of figures in the foreground to structure his composition. As Wittkower noted many years ago, the primary pair of figures came from Bernini's well-known Rape of Persephone. In this way, Cortona paid tribute to the greatest living sculptor while underscoring, by contrast, the coloristic vision and atmospheric space unique to painting. Since the early sixteenth century, painters and sculptors had competed to highlight the distinctive qualities of their different art forms as did the new theoretical writers on art who cranked out ever more sophisticated and complex discussions of art and artistic ingenuity. Both practice and theory contributed to the new aesthetic self-consciousness of Baroque art and to the self-consciousness display of artistic innovation and media-specific virtuosity https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=142321081 142321081 ceiling, Pitti Palace, Florence https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577432 140577432 ceiling, Pitti Palace, Florence https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=140577433 140577433 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=146263485 146263485 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=141710096 141710096 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=146263484 146263484 This small-scale bronze bronze reproduces the famous Hermaphroditus in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who collected homoerotic nudes in classical and modern Italian sculpture including Bernini's David, Pluto, and Apollo. He hired Bernini to sculpt a soft bed for his Hermaphrodite, thereby inviting viewers to go to bed with this dreamy nude. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=143935772 143935772 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=143935773 143935773 Fedee Galizia signed her painting of Judith and Holofernes on the sword of Judith. Just as Judith stole the warrior's sword and used it to cut off his head, so Galizia used her signature to appropriate masculine power for herself as a painter. As Judith wields the sword, Galizia wields her powerful brush. Indeed, she also wields the sword in one sense. For it is the artist who cuts off the head of Holofernes here by exercising supreme power over all that she paints. Alas, Galizia is better at describing jewels and silks than she is at bringing figures to life through movement and psychological expression. In contrast to Caravaggio and Artimisia Gentileschi, her heroine looks more like a pretty mannequin. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=150356887 150356887 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=150356888 150356888 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=154142535 154142535 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=154142536 154142536