Pietro da Cortona and the Este in Modena

• Autores: Alice Jarrard
• Localización: Burlington magazine, ISSN 0007-6287, Vol. 140, Nº 1138, 1998, págs. 16-24
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In November 1661 Cardinal Rinaldo d'Este received a letter from his Roman agent discussing the suitability of various Roman artists for a major fresco cycle. This document, first published in 1892, has always been taken to refer to a project for the palace rented by the Este family in Rome,' but the recent recovery of the rest of the correspondence now makes clear that it concerns a series of frescoes planned by the artist Pietro da Cortona for a suite of six rooms in the new Palazzo Ducale in Modena (Fig. 18). In a sequence of letters written between September 1661 and February 1662 (see the Appendix below), Rinaldo's Roman agent, Girolamo Muzzarelli, chronicles the development of this project which, had it not been abandoned, would have been Pietro da Cortona's last, and perhaps his grandest, cycle of dynastic frescoes, surpassing those in the Palazzo Pitti in size, and unusually including explicit references to modern history. Besides illuminating the complicated process of devising a large-scale fresco-cycle at long distance, the letters underline the different attitudes towards the conception of such cycles in the ducal capitals of central Italy as opposed to papal Rome.2 They provide a rare glimpse into the workings of Cortona's studio and the process of iconographic invention,3 and also reveal the artist's mature beliefs about painting.