Ovid and the Aerial Metamorphoses Painted by Sebastiano del Piombo in the Loggia di Galatea

Abstract

The cycle of frescoes painted by Sebastiano del Piombo in the Galatea loggia in Agostino Chigi’s Villa Farnesina presents a selection of episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, all of which share a common theme of ‘air’. What has not yet been appreciated, however, is that the cycle constitutes - in the first instance - an accurate and meticulous depiction of Ovid’s text in the version put forward by the fifteenth century’s most respected philologist and Ovid scholar, Raffaele Regio, and - in the second - a hitherto unknown system of signs imbued with a new symbolic value. Ovid’s stories should be interpreted here as meta-mythologies: plays within a play, the episodes of metamorphosis from the Greek myths operate not only in their own right as re-enactments of ancient fabulae; they also function in relation to the zodiacal and extra-zodiacal constellations that are depicted in the vault to create a representation of the horoscope of the patron, Agostino Chigi, with the ‘good’ stars watching over him. In this context, more than ever Ovid’s narrative takes on a semantic versatility that is the product of over a thousand years of semiotic evolution: alongside the classical, literal meaning and the moral sense attributed to it by Christian tradition, it is imbued with symbolic and biographical connotations that have been specially conceived to reflect and magnify, as in an interplay of mirrors, the persona of the protagonist at the centre of the entire decorative scheme.