Allegorical Composition: Music and Justice with the Spinola Arms

Allegorical Composition: Music and Justice with the Spinola Arms

Giovanni Battista Gaulli (Il Baciccio)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Once owned by the distinguished French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774), this highly finished drawing appears in the 1775-76 sale catalogue of his collection. It has been identified as preparatory for the frontispiece of "Il Corradino," a libretto for a tragedy set in medieval Naples, written by Antonio Caraccio (1630-1702), and published in Rome in 1694 (see Rome 1994, and Bibliography). The fasces held by a cherub at the upper right and the scales are attributes of Justice, who prominently bears a shield with the arms of the Spinola, among Genoa's oldest patrician families. "Il Corradino" was dedicated to Giovanni Battista Spinola, then governor of Rome. The seated female figure holding an array of wind instruments may personify Euterpe, the Muse of lyric poetry and music, an appropriate reference in a libretto. The Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius are depicted in the distant background (Bean 1979, no. 226). The Metropolitan Museum sheet is closer in design to the published frontispiece, engraved by Robert van Audenaerde, than is a related drawing in the Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf (inv. no. FP 1929) (Carmen C. Bambach, 1995, revised 2014)

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Allegorical Composition: Music and Justice with the Spinola ArmsAllegorical Composition: Music and Justice with the Spinola ArmsAllegorical Composition: Music and Justice with the Spinola ArmsAllegorical Composition: Music and Justice with the Spinola ArmsAllegorical Composition: Music and Justice with the Spinola Arms

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.