Allegory of Air

The scene in Air echoes the opening of Virgil's Aeneid. Juno, queen of the gods and mistress of the air, wants the Trojan fleet wrecked, and she calls on Aeolus, the keeper of the winds, to let them loose. Here she sits in her chariot among female figures who stand for the meteors, which in Albani's day meant everything that happens in the sky, and orders Aeolus, seated on a rock below, to free the winds.

It is one of the four elements Albani painted in the later 1620s for Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy, and the only one now hung apart from the others. Fire, Water and Earth share Sala 27, and Air is next door, in Sala 28.