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- Title
Annibale Carracci's "Leto" in Kroměříž.
- Authors
Pigozzi, Marinella
- Abstract
After giving birth to Apollo and Diana, children of Jupiter, Leto was forced by a jealous Juno to flee from the island of Delos. The goddess and her small children pushed as far as the borders of Lycia. Tired, exhausted and thirsty from the long journey and the heat of the sun, she looked for water and caught sight of a pond. On the shores, some farmers were busy picking swamp twigs to weave wreaths and baskets. Cheered up, she approached with her children but, while she was trying to cup her hands to drink some water, the farmers stopped her and tried to have sex with her. When she refused, they muddied the water in order to prevent her from drinking and chase her away. Enraged, Leto turned them into frogs and the standing water became their eternal dwelling. Her desperate maternal instinct was the impetus behind this sudden metamorphosis in order to contain the farmers' sexual urge and punish them for their hostility. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the mother cuddles the two infants who reach out for her, in a clever rhetorical strategy that recurs in many images. In the painting by Annibale Carracci one of them looks asleep, while the other leans on the protective arm of the mother. The farmers, caught in the process of metamorphosing, are muddying the water, stirring up the sediment at the bottom of the pond with their hands and feet. The notion of urbanitas, theorized in the treatises of Pontano, Guazzo and Castiglione, and spread by Dolce and Anguillara, the most skilled adapters of Ovid's text, became the new standard in ethical behavior. Moving between tradition and courtly innovation, Dolce and Anguillara contributed to an aesthetic, hedonistic rereading of the Metamorphoses, which mirrored the new cultural models. Carlo Cesare Malvasia wrote about the work, which he saw in Rome at the house of the Pamphilj family, in 1678: "At the Pamphilj's [...] Leto in the countryside, where the farmers muddied the water, a painting in the Venetian manner, is a very beautiful work." This is confirmed by the inventory of the family collection carried out by Prince Giovan Battista Pamphilj (1648-1709) in 1680. The passage reads as follows: "Th e goddess Leto with the shepherds turning into frogs, 4 shepherds in water with a four-feet gold-gilded frame by Anibale Carracci". I believe that the Latona formerly at the Pamphilj home is the canvas currently housed in Kroměříž, which in 1691 entered the collection of Karl von Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn (1624-1695), Bishop of Olomouc in Moravia since 1664. An important marriage connects Bologna to Rome where, as mentioned above, the painting is documented even before entering the collection of the Bishop of Olomouc in 1691. Violante Facchinetti married Giovanni Battista Pamphilj in 1671. Violante brought most of her painting gallery over to Rome, incorporating it into the Pamphilj collection.
- Subjects
JUPITER (Roman deity); METAMORPHOSIS; LUST; CARRACCI, Annibale, 1560-1609; LETO (Greek deity)
- Publication
Czech & Slovak Journal of Humanities, 2016, Issue 3, p62
- ISSN
1805-3742
- Publication type
Article