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
