Proserpina Abducted by Pluto, Design for a Fresco Decoration in Palazzo Giuliari, Verona

Author: Albert Elen

Farinati became the leading painter in Verona when his good friend and younger colleague Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) left for Venice in 1553. His work bears traces of the Mannerist influences of Michelangelo (1475-1564), Giulio Romano (c.1499-1546) and Parmigianino (1503-1540). He was assisted in his studio by his son Orazio (1559-1616), who made prints after several of his father’s paintings.

What appear at first sight to be four cheerfully frolicking, lightly dressed young women are,^[1] in fact, the female companions of the young goddess Proserpine fleeing in panic after she has been abducted by Pluto. They had all been caught unawares by the god of the underworld while picking flowers by Lake Pergusa. Some petals can be seen in the fold of the dress of the woman on the left. On the far right, behind the decorative volute of a winged woman, one can just see Pluto’s right leg, together with that of Proserpine as he is carrying her off.

This is one of the preliminary drawings for a decorative frieze in Palazzo Giuliari in Verona that Farinati painted around 1573, probably for the family of the same name.^[2] The fresco based on this drawing runs along the top of the south wall of the Sala di Persefone. Farinati departed from his drawn design for the painted version. He copied the women from the drawing, but removed the volute on the right, and with it the largely hidden figures of Pluto and Poserpine, replacing them with two charging horses of Pluto’s war chariot (fig.). As a result, the scene now precedes the abduction of Proserpine, and the room that bears her name makes her more emphatically present as the main character. She is probably the woman moving to the left in the middle of the scene. So whereas there was a combination of two scenes in the drawing she has now acquired a distinct identity. The drawing has been cropped at the truncated point of the garment on the left. Comparison with the fresco makes it clear that a fifth woman had been depicted in a falling position there.

Pluto and Proserpine are riding in his chariot drawn by four horses in the fresco on the west wall. The scenes on the north and east walls show Demeter, Proserpine’s mother, searching for her daughter. She asks for help from Jupiter, Proserpine’s father, and takes her revenge on Ascalaphus, a spirit from the underworld. He had witnessed Persephone eating six pomegranate seeds, while Jupiter had made it a condition of her remaining in the underworld that she should not eat anything while down there. When she did so nevertheless, she had to remain in the underworld for six months of the year. Every time that she resurfaced, spring was breaking, which accounts for how she became the personification of this season. The story is from Greek mythology as related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.^[3]

The drawing is a good example of Farinati’s Mannerist style, with influences from Parmigianino and Andrea Schiavone (c.1510-1563). It is marked by inventive, occasionally artificial poses and sculptural forms achieved with washes on top of contours and hatching drawn with the pen. The latter are absent in this drawing, giving the scene a certain airiness and contributing to the elegance of the figures. The functionality of the drawing is apparent not only from the similarities and dissimilarities to the painted fresco, but also from the squaring applied over the drawing that was necessary to transfer the composition to scale to a different support, either the cartoon or directly onto the wall. Farinati’s later work, which was and still is popular, is characterized by attractive contrasts, but it lacks the dynamism and exploratory nature to be found in these preparatory drawings for fresco cycles. That later work includes many autonomous drawings made for the art market on larger sheets of paper with a coloured ground, white highlights, and washes for the shaded passages.

Other comparable preliminary drawings for friezes in the three rooms of Palazzo Giuliari have also survived. Some have the same provenance as ours, as shown by the annotated numbers at lower right. They were once part of the vast collection of drawings belonging to the famous Paris collector Pierre Crozat (1665-1740). It ran to 19,201 sheets in 202 portfolios, 70 percent of which were by Italian masters.^[4] The numbering was added by the art dealer and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette while making the inventory of Crozat’s estate for the sale catalogue.^[5]