Allegory of Creation

This small copper panel, made around 1585 for Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici's private study in Rome, turns verses from the Psalms into a picture. The Latin on the stone block at lower left says that God made all things in wisdom and set them under man's feet. So God the Father floats in the clouds holding a book marked alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Below him a young man, standing for human genius, lifts an armillary sphere, the ringed model of the heavens, with a lion lying at his foot. Around them Zucchi packs animals, birds, fruit, shells and fish. The Borghese inventory of 1693 gave it to Cavalier d'Arpino, by 1790 it had become a work by the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel, and the art historian Roberto Longhi later returned it to Zucchi. Its companion, Coral Fishing, hangs in the Hercules Room, while this panel is kept in storage.