th
# 72 •nOvemBER 16 , 2015
to be the one who commissioned the work, even
if the building is linked to
the name of Luigi Gonzaga, also called Rodomonte, that was only twenty
years old at the time of the
fresco.
there are no human activities or planets that govern
the signs. In the large arches that mark the walls,
we have episodes sometimes drawn from myths in
an original way, elements
of royal archeology, and
scenes of a symbolic nature not always easy to interpret.
The author of the work
is Giovanni Maria Falconetto, a painter from Verona from the beginning
of the 1500s who doesn't
come off in his style from
the late 1400 tradition,
but remains very close to
the school of Lorenzo Costa, a painter from Ferrara
who was very active in the
small kingdoms of the Po
Valley of the time.
The whole hall shows a
deep scholarly and very
punctual preparation, but
it leaves many unresolved questions such as the
identity of the old figure
at the base of the Cancer
month, which is believed
The second, much more
interesting mystery, is that
a room in the Palazzo Della Rovere in Rome, named
"of Penitentiaries", painted by Pinturicchio and
now very pale, is pretty
much the source of inspiration for the whole cycle,
but no one has yet discovered what kind of relationship there was between the two buildings, and
especially between the
two clients of the works.
For sure it is not a simple
copycat by Falconetto to
the work of Pinturicchio,
because at those time the
client, not the artist, was
the one to decide the theme of the artistic work. So
it's unlikely that such a refined and particular iconological choice had been
entirely taken and copied
without a real relationship
between the two places,
or between the two client
families.
WE THE ITALIANS | 59
www.wetheitalians.com