Astraea Leaving the Earth

Some 20 years after painting Astraea's return for the Medici, Rosa, by then settled in Rome, took up the same goddess and painted her leaving. The ancient poets gave her a last stop on the way out. Virgil wrote that when Justice left the earth at the end of the age of iron, her final footprints were among the farmers, and this tall canvas of about 1665 shows that parting. Astraea rises away from the ground, and the fasces, the bound rods of Roman authority, and her scales stay behind with an upright farmer holding a sheaf. The museum sees two moods at once, a world gone to moral ruin and a hope that plain country life might still lead back to better times. The picture travelled a long way round. It was in Florence in 1824, was bought in Genoa in 1840 by an English collector, and stayed in English hands until the Kunsthistorisches Museum acquired it in 1988, nearly two centuries after the earlier Astraea had come to Vienna from Florence.