A design for a ceiling, with tondi depicting mythological scenes.

Lauri worked on many decorative projects for some of the most eminent patrons in Rome. This is a study for a ceiling in Palazzo Borghese. The two roundels depict, on the left, the obscure myth of Jupiter and Garamantis; and on the right, Syrinx escaping the lascivious Pan by being turned into a reed. The rectangular frames in the curves of the vault were to be filled with landscapes by Gaspard Dughet.

This drawing is a study for a ceiling in Palazzo Borghese, Rome, remodelled between 1671 and 1678 for Giovanni Battista Borghese by the architect Carlo Rainaldi. The decorating of the rooms started immediately each had been built, beginning with a pair of apartments on the lower mezzanine. Paintings by Lauri, Luigi Garzi, Gaspard Dughet and a team of assistants under Ciro Ferri, were executed between 1671 and 1673, with payments to Lauri between November 1671 and June 1672. Lauri, Garzi and Ferri were already in the employ of Borghese, having been commissioned to paint an altarpiece each for the new church of Santi Gregorio e Antonino, while Dughet, the brother-in-law of Nicolas Poussin, was established as one of Rome’s leading landscapists.

The ceiling was described in detail by Francesco Saverio Baldinucci (son of Filippo) in a manuscript biography of Lauri:

’In 1671 he painted in gouache [i.e. not in fresco], in the palace of Prince Borghese in Rome, the vault of a little room, representing at its apex the fabled wedding of Bacchus and Ariadne, crowned by Venus in the presence of satyrs and bacchantes celebrating with cups of wine and with musical instruments in their hands. In the decorations of the four windows are painted four fables, in roundels carried by figures in chiaroscuro, the same size (three palmi) as the others. And these are: Io, converted into a cow and guarded by Argus, who, searched for by her father, writes her name in the earth with a hoof. In the second can be seen Io enjoyed by Jupiter in the form of clouds, while Juno stares at them with a spiteful face, breathing jealousy. In the third is the nymph Garamantis seen bathing in a stream by Jupiter, who, turned on by her, flies in on the wings of an eagle to embrace her; and she, fleeing, is caught by a crayfish who bites her foot, and is ravished. The fourth shows the river god Alpheus pursuing Arethusa, while Diana protects her by interposing a cloud and by shooting an arrow to tear open the earth; falling into the hole, the nymph is transformed into a river.’

There has been some confusion about the mythological episodes depicted in this drawing. That on the left corresponds with the painted tondo of Jupiter and Garamantis, a rarely represented myth which is described in Book 11, Chapter 11 of Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gods. The scene on the right is not to be found on the Palazzo Borghese ceiling, and seems to depict Pan and Syrinx, resembling Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the subject (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden).

Between the pediments, and on the short walls, were rectangular ‘frames’ in the curves of the vault, which were filled with mythological landscapes by Dughet. Here Lauri displaced the central frame a little to the left, probably to enhance the illusion, when entering the room, that the frames stood proud of the curve of the ceiling and that the pediments projected in front of them. The frame as painted was stripped of its winged bucranium, and the mask in a shell above was flanked only by garlands; the putti were used instead for the frames of the landscapes on the short walls of the ceiling, where they support the dragon and eagle of the Borghese arms.

Catalogue entry adapted from The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, London, 2007