Triumph of Galatea

More than a hundred years come between Cennini’s dismissal of women as unworthy of study to form the “perfect body” and the famous text ascribed to Raphael about generating his image of Galatea (fig. 4.1) through an “Idea.” The two texts betray contrasting attitudes toward the artistic worth of female beauty that encapsulate a...

Earlier in the sixteenth century, Sebastiano del Piombo, the Venetian artist working in Rome, painted a particularly novel picture of Venus mourning the death of Adonis (fig. 83). Sebastiano’s painting stands apart from the various pictures of Venus and Adonis that I have considered here thus far...

The fresco of the Marriage of Alexander and Roxana (fig. 89), painted by Sodoma for Agostino Chigi’s bedchamber in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, is based on Lucian’s description of a painting by Apelles that celebrated this episode in the life of his patron Alexander the Great. Distantly based on a drawing by Raphael, the work was fairly certainly completed to coincide with Chigi’s marriage on 28 August 1519, under pressure from Pope Leo X, to his Venetian mistress, Francesca Ordeaschi …