Casino dell aurora guercino biography

As Archbishop of Bologna , he had greatly admired Guercino's work and was one of his most politically powerful patrons. On his elevation to the papacy, Ludovisi summoned the then year-old artist to Rome to paint the fresco decoration of the ceiling of the Loggia dell Benedizioni. Peter's, had been completed in The fee Guercino was promised was the immense sum of 22, scudi , but, in the event, he never even started work.

The day after his coronation, Gregory XV appointed his year-old nephew Ludovico Ludovisi as cardinal. Intelligent, politically effective and a strong proponent of his family's interests, the cardinale nipote seems to have had quite different ideas as to how Guercino's precious time in Rome should be spent, and he put them into immediate effect.

At the young cardinal's initiative, the ambitious Benediction Loggia commission was jettisoned.

The Casino dell' Aurora.

From his point of view, there were good practical reasons against the painter starting such an enormous official project at the beginning of the new pope's reign. The Cardinal predicted, rightly it turns out, that access to unlimited papal funds through his ailing uncle might be short-lived, hence his substitution of smaller private commissions for the Ludovisi inner circle.

Cardinal Ludovisi wasted no time in advancing the family's interests, and on 3 June he purchased from Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte the former Casino del Nero in the rural area near Porta Pinciana, as well as adjacent land and properties. Decoration of the renamed Casino Ludovisi was underway by 29 July Thanks to Guercino's use of tempera on a dry plaster surface — as opposed to buon fresco — he could undertake the sorts of changes he was accustomed to making in his oil paintings, but the penalty was a sometimes grubby-looking finish in the corrected passages.

The creature at which Fame points her trumpet is neither a dove nor an eagle, but a phoenix, the symbol of eternity and rebirth. The ceiling is only 5 meters high, so upon entering the room, the spectator has the sense of being in the midst of a dizzying performance. Labels: 17th century , allegory , artists , baroque , ceilings , copies , drawings , engravings , etchings , frescoes , Italy , landscapes , myth , paintings , patrons , Rome , tempera.