Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power (Cortona)
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The vast fresco of the Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Poweris a the masterpiece of Pietro da Cortona, filling the ceiling of the grand salon of the Palazzo Barberini (now the Galleria Nazionale, Rome). Begun in 1633, it was generally finished within 3 years, and, upon Corona's return from Venice, was extensively reworked to completion in 1639. The Palazzo Barberini was since the 1620's, the palatial home of a family headed by Maffeo Barberini, by then Urban VIII. This pope spent extravagant sums on refurbishing Rome with art and architecture: among his commissions are the Bernini-designed bronze Cathedra and Baldachin in Saint Peter's Basilica. Not all such embellishment and expenditure was always well-received; it was said of this pope, when he pillaged the bronze medallions from the Pantheon roof, that what the "Barbarous vandals" had not ruined, the "Barberini" had wrought.
His myriad commissioned artworks often show teeming suns and bees (his family heraldic emblem). The Palazzo Barberini fresco is no exception. At one end of the sky sits the eminent solar Divine Providence, while at the other end are putti and flying maidens holding aloft the papal keys, papal tiara, with robe belt above a swarm of heraldic giant golden bees. Below Providence the simulated frame crumbles. Time with a scythe seems to swallow a putti's arm. A starry crown is ferried up to the heraldic swarm. Some suggest that part of the intent of this roof was to portray the Barberini papal election, rumored to have been rigged, as divine providence.
Frescoes were numerous in Cortona's Rome; most represented framed galleries of episodes such as found in the Sistine Chapel ceiling or in Annibale Carracci's Palazzo Farnese (completed 1601) cycle. Baldasare Peruzzi had begun a style of painting called quadratura, in which the fresco replaces or simulates some of the architectural framework, using often forced perspective. It is a teeming and sunny tour de force that can be compared to similar later frescoes by Tiepolo in the ceilings of theroom of the Royal Palace in Madrid and in the frescoes depicting the of the Pisani family in Villa Stra. Other famous [sotto in su] frescoes in Rome include Andrea Pozzo's of St Ignatius at church of Sant'Ignazio.
Modern Assessment
Cortona's visual panegyric trompe l'oeil extavaganzas have lost favor in our minimalist sardonic times; they appear like cheap trickery in an age accustomed to photographic distortion. His sunny and cherubim-infested panoramas appear to have led to rococo excesses,and stand in stark contrast with darker, sparser, renegade naturalism prominent in Caravaggisti, and remind us that the Baroque was not a monolithic style. But in Cortona, the baroque excesses, like those of Annibale Carraci in the Farnese Gallery, appear to be reined by a classicizing urge. Cortona the painter, like Bernini as architect and sculptor, was prized by his patrons, and today appears reactionary, thus patronizing. Yet if artistic excellence is crowned by the ability to match style to intent within the limitations of the medium, then Cortona is royally triumphant. He was among first of the fresco painters that sought to dispense with the architectural roof by painting it away. While rising heavenward, these works, like the Barberini allegory stagger and humble the visitor as if he (she) stood over, and not below, a looming abyss of mythic power, which threatens to overwhelm him (her).
References
- Joseph Connors in The New York Review of Books, XXXIX, 21(7):58-62 December 1992; he reviews Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan, New York and Cambridge, Mass., 1990, and John Beldon Scott, Images of Nepotism: The Painted Ceilings of Palazzo Barberini, Princeton, 1991
- ["Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power"
