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+--- Thread: Villa Aurora: US princess evicted (/showthread.php?tid=161)
Villa Aurora: US princess evicted - Paul Ferguson - 04-22-2023
'A US-born princess has been evicted from a villa in Rome housing the only ceiling mural by the artist Caravaggio. The highlight of the six-storey villa's many treasures is the painting by the 16th and 17th Century artist Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio. The oil painting depicts the gods Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, with the world at its centre and marked by signs of the zodiac. The artist is said to have painted the gods to look like himself. It is the world's only surviving Caravaggio mural, itself estimated to have a value of €310m. It was painted in 1597 after the villa's first owner commissioned it for his alchemy room. Remarkably, the painting was only discovered in the late 1960s, before which it had been covered up.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65342996
And from Wiki:
'The palace represents the only remnant of a much larger suburban retreat established in the 16th-century by Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte (1549–1627). The Cardinal was a diplomat, intellectual, art connoisseur, and collector, protector and patron of famous figures such as Galileo Galilei and Caravaggio. One of the smaller rooms of the Casino boasts the only painting ever executed by Caravaggio on a ceiling, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto (c. 1597), which reflects, in symbolic imagery derived from Classical mythology, another of the cardinal's interests: alchemy.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_di_Villa_Boncompagni_Ludovisi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Maria_del_Monte
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter,_Neptune_and_Pluto
'Cardinal del Monte believed all natural things to be derived from a triad of elements: sulphur-air (Jupiter), mercury-water (Neptune), and salt-earth (Pluto). In the painting, Jupiter, floating on top between his two brothers, is manipulating a celestial globe containing the earth, the sun, and the stars, in order to achieve the astrological conditions propitious for the processes that Paracelsus called the Great Work, whereby the three elements could be transformed into the philosopher's stone, that is, the elixir of life. The philosophical implication is that by mastering the elements and therefore the material world, man might also control his own spirit, surely an appropriate sentiment for the private study of a learned sophisticate like Del Monte.'
https://www.caravaggio.org/jupiter-neptune-and-pluto.jsp
RE: Villa Aurora: US princess evicted - Carl Lavoie - 04-24-2023
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There is a paper by Mino Gabriele about that painting:
Le Caravage et les quatre éléments, in Aspects de la tradiction alchimique au XVIIe siècle -Actes du Colloque international de l’ Université de Reims-Champagne- Ardenne (Reims, 28 et 29 novembre 1996), sous la direction de F. Greiner, Paris- Milan, 1998, pp.287-294.
RE: Villa Aurora: US princess evicted - Paul Ferguson - 04-26-2023
Interesting interview about the paintings here with Raffaelle Morsini, Professor at the Univ of Teramo:
https://tinyurl.com/4es34jvd
And more about Guercino here, with images:
http://spenceralley.blogspot.com/2016/11/guercinos-rome-17th-century.html
BTW, isn't Guercino the "Et In Arcadia Ego" guy, or one of?
RE: Villa Aurora: US princess evicted - Carl Lavoie - 04-30-2023
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Yes, Guernico, Poussin, and probably other, more obscure ones.
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