1606, Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), St. Agnes -- Palazzo Barberini (Rome)
From the museum label: More than a devotional hagiographic picture, Domenichino's painting is an exercise in style. The painter faithfully reproduced or, rather, carefully traced the outline of the Lady with the Unicorn that his master Annibale Carracci had frescoed in the Farnese Palace around 1605.
Thus, the accomplished reinterpretation - with the addition of the golden halo and the canonical attribute of the lamb - is not only an obsequious personal homage, but it also becomes an essay of skill, which plays on a subtle reversal of meaning. The tender gesture of the virgin is no longer the passionate dominion of the untamable mythological animal, but the voluntary and even happy acceptance of martyrdom, of which the sacrificial lamb is the symbol par excellence.
1606, Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), St. Agnes -- Palazzo Barberini (Rome)
From the museum label: More than a devotional hagiographic picture, Domenichino's painting is an exercise in style. The painter faithfully reproduced or, rather, carefully traced the outline of the Lady with the Unicorn that his master Annibale Carracci had frescoed in the Farnese Palace around 1605.
Thus, the accomplished reinterpretation - with the addition of the golden halo and the canonical attribute of the lamb - is not only an obsequious personal homage, but it also becomes an essay of skill, which plays on a subtle reversal of meaning. The tender gesture of the virgin is no longer the passionate dominion of the untamable mythological animal, but the voluntary and even happy acceptance of martyrdom, of which the sacrificial lamb is the symbol par excellence.