Artibus et Historiae no. 16 (VIII)
1987, ISSN 0391-9064Up
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Buy article pdf
PAUL F. WATSON - On a Window in Parnassus
The window on Parnassus is the shuttered object that figures in Marcantonio Raimondi's engraved Parnassus, after Raphael (ca. 1517-20). This preserves Raphael's first thought or modello for the fresco in the Segnatura (1509-11), as scholarly consensus maintains and geometric analyses also demonstrate. Simpler in form than the final fresco, engraved Parnassus also differs in content: a tightly-worked out demonstration of poetry, its genres, hierarchies and activities, derived from a body of classical texts (Virgil, Horace) consistently Augustan. Raphael's classicized Parnassus also serves an epideictic function, directing attention to that new and Roman Parnassus, the Villa of the Belvedere, an orientation stressed by the engraver and the window on Parnassus that anchors his reworking of Raphael's first composition.
