Allegory and the antique

The myth of Perseus and Andromeda, painted by Cavalier d’Arpino on all kinds of supports, is appropriate for a lithic support: the young woman, almost mistaken for a statue by the hero, was bound to the rock, just like her painted image cannot be separated from the stone; in the aftermath of this episode Perseus petrified his enemies with the head of Medusa. The tiny painting in a private collection, which can be dated stylistically to the early 1590s, is one of the first on pietra paesina and one of the first on stone to represent a mythological narrative. The painters from Verona, Turchi and Ottino, were instead the first to paint secular subjects on black stone, associating them to tragic episodes, from approximately 1608-1609, when Ottino was in Rome for a brief sojourn. Medea, in a particularly gory narrative, draws out Aeson’s blood and substitutes it with a fiendish magic potion to restore his youth. Memory, intellect and Will in the painting by Turchi were associated by St Augustin to the three persons of the Trinity, and represent also three faculties given by God to man at creation to bring him close to its mystery.  Intellect stands on and holds a slab of stone, Memory holds a mirror, alluding to the shining surface of the touchstone that makes the figures float in space.

 

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