The architectural background in a mythological or religious painting usually serves a dual function, both iconographic and aesthetic. The most obvious is to provide an appropriate setting for whatever action or situation the figures are intended to portray. At times, in keeping with the doctrine of decorum, this can be quite specific. For example, a pyramid and a pylon will normally indicate that the scene takes place in Egypt. Often, however, the architectural component is suggestive rather than explicit. A marble balustrade, a garden niche, two tall fluted columns may be used to set the mood or provide pictorial enrichment. To the extent that such architectural elements supply or suggest subject matter, they are to that extent iconographic and do not here concern us. Our concern is with the architectural background as an instrument of style. In paintings that are primarily figurative but also contain elements of architecture, it seems reasonable to suppose that, broadly speaking, both components will be in the same style, and this in fact is usually the case. Paintings in which the poses of the figures, the arrangement of their garments, and their organization into compositional groups are all predominantly classical make use of architectural elements to produce classical effects, and Baroque paintings use architectural components to produce effects that are Baroque.1 Give or take a few exceptions, this is the case throughout all of the seventeenth century. In Domenichino's Saint Cecilia Giving Clothing to the Poor, a fresco painted about 1616 for S. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome (Fig. 1), the figures are arranged in a geometry so severe that they seem to be almost frozen.2 Inside the closed composition they are disposed on planes parallel to the plane of the picture frame, the poor below, the saint and her servants above. Individual motifs, such as the alignment of arms and legs, often serve to reinforce this parallelism. The constructions created by the figures are echoed in the architecture with, if anything, even greater intensity. All the architectural components are rigidly aligned in receding planes which parallel the picture plane. Not one building, not one block is allowed to slip out of place. That the temple in the background is unequivocally ancient Roman, that it is quite specifically pseudoperipteral prostyle Corinthian with a blank frieze is part of the subject matter, the setting. But that it sits foursquare and solid in absolute alignment with the surface, with the other elements of architecture, and with so many of the figures; and that it must be set so, that it is unthinkable that Domenichino might have placed it at any other angle, that he might have, so to speak, cut it loose and allowed it to float free all this is a function of style and a good example of its compelling force. Small wonder that this type of composition had such an impact on Poussin. When we turn from Baroque Classicism to High Baroque the formula remains equally valid. With respect to style at any rate, where the figures in the painting lead the painted architecture follows. Minerva Welcoming Virtues and Expelling Vices (Fig. 2), one of a series of canvases that Giovanni Coli and Filippo Gherardi painted about 1664 for the ceiling of the library of the monastery of S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, is a good example.3 Coli and Gherardi are from Lucca, but so thoroughly did they absorb the lessons of Venetian painting that their early work is rightly considered to be an integral part of the Venetian seicento tradition. In this scene, which is set in front of the temple of Minerva, the two artists take their cue from the action implicit in the iconography, which requires the Vir-