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.
