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NESSUS AND DEIANIRA
In a frescoed Study, above a wall of books, the centaur
Nessus abducts Hercules' lover Deianira; on the opposite wall, Hercules on the
shore reaches for an arrow, poisoned with the gall of the Hydra he had killed.
The arrow will fly across the room, over the head of the contemplative reader;
it will kill Nessus, but the dying centaur will deceive Deianira into believing
his now poisoned blood is a love potion to be given to Hercules when she doubts
his loyalty. She eventually does, and soaks his shirt in Nessus' blood, which
burns Hercules to death-but also opens the door to his triumphant apotheosis to
the table of the gods under his father Jupiter. So this studiolo,
ostensibly a place of quiet contemplation, involves the reader in its frescoed
narrative, forcing the scholar to acknowledge the active life, and the complex
life of the passions- a tension which is in fact a fully humanist
situation.
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THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS
In a pastoral composition that masks the underlying tension between the humanist
and post-humanist attitudes toward the natural and the man-made embodied
in three distinct landscapes, this three panel folding screen was created for a
patron who desired an image that represented Rome, New York and Virginia.
Investing these disparate parts with an architectural allegory, the three
landscapes are resolved into metaphors for the three goddesses from the story of the
Judgement of Paris. How one assigns Juno (Power), Minerva (Wisdom) and Venus (Beauty)
to the three loci is a subjective judgement of the viewer (although there is a preferred reading).
The Judgement of Paris between the three goddesses is moreover the conflict that
starts the chain of events which cause the Trojan war,
inspiring Homer and resulting in the end in the creation of Rome,
according to Virgil's Aeneid.
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