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.
