View Page: Divine Nepotism

	Divine Nepotism
	written by lmschultz / 08.01.2005

Section Two

2 of 7

Description

Fig. 3

Divine Providence, Pietro da Cortona, fresco, Palazzo Barberini. Oblique-angle view from ideal station point.

The Grand Salone of the Palazzo Barberini has been called one of the most brilliant creations of Roman Baroque art. But what makes it so? Rather than develop any new radical techniques, principal innovations of Cortona’s fresco derive from a synthesis of three distinct traditions of illusionistic ceiling painting: the Roman tradition of fictive entablatures and faux materials, the Lombard-Emilian tradition of figures overlapping feigned architecture and the Venetian effect of the illusionistic vertical plane of figures.

The shear size of the Salone alone is unprecedented. Not since the decoration of the Sala Clementina in the Vatican (1597-98) had a ceiling of similar dimensions been painted. In true quadratura paintings, such as the Sala Clementina or those in the Casino Ludovisi, the fictive architecture expands the vertical space of the room continuing the structure lines of the actual walls into imaginary space. Cortona’s painted framework follows the surface of the actual vault rather than breaking through it. The illusionistic architecture does not violate the architectonic integrity of the vault. Instead the framework serves to define the physical surface of the vault. Cortona first considered a system of quadri riportati inspired by the Farnese Gallery. He rejected this standard Mannerist solution in favor of a traditional Roman device, popular throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a fictive framework that divides the vault into five sections. But instead of using three-dimensional stucco, Cortona used paint to create the effect. The delicate gilt and white stucco decoration, which provides the transition between the painted vault and the walls of the salone, is one of Cortona’s early ventures into this medium, which he was soon to develop to new heights. The framework enables the viewer to perceive both the illusionist widening and illusionist contraction of space. An open sky behind the scene in each field unites the unlimited space beyond the frame. At the same time figures and clouds superimposed on the frame seem to hover within the vault in the viewer’s space. This double illusionism has a long tradition with Lombard and Emilian painters, exemplified in the work of Mantegna and Correggio.

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