Picus Transformed into a Woodpecker

Ovid tells this story in the fourteenth book of the Metamorphoses. Picus, a king in ancient Italy, is out hunting boar when the sorceress Circe sees him and falls in love. He turns her down, because he means to stay faithful to his wife Canens, and Circe touches him with her wand and changes him into a woodpecker. Garofalo spreads the tale across the canvas in several episodes. The capture of the boar fills the foreground like a lively hunting scene, the meeting with Circe takes place further back, and on the left her palace rises, an ambitious building in the antique style, surrounded by her victims turned into animals. Around 1526, the date recent studies favour, Garofalo was watching what Giulio Romano was painting in Mantua, and the museum traces this hunt to a medallion in the Sala dei Venti of the Palazzo Te. One figure is missing. In 1632 an inventory in Ferrara described the picture closely, including a sorceress flying, held up by devils, and she is gone, because the canvas was later cut down on the right. That cut is why it is narrower than its companion, Claudia Quinta towing the ship of Cybele. The museum reads the pair as a husband's fidelity and a bride's chastity, perhaps painted for a marriage chamber in a Ferrarese palace.