Roman Carnival: Allegory of Winter

In the Catholic calendar, carnival belonged to winter. It filled the weeks before Lent, which usually began in February, and in Rome it was the noisiest festival of the year. People went about in masks, processions wound through the streets, and races were run down the long straight street in the city centre that still carries their name, the Corso, ever since a pope moved the carnival races there in the 1460s. The Alte Pinakothek titles this picture Roman Carnival and adds Winter in brackets, so a city festival stands here for a whole season. It is a copper disc just over 12 centimetres across, dated by the museum to around 1596. Its companion is a summer harvest of the same size and shape, and both are shown in a display case in Cabinet 9.