The Age of Bronze

Cortona painted the first two walls of this room in 1637 and then left Florence. He came back for the remaining two in 1641, and the manner had changed: heavier bodies, faster movement, a debt to Rubens that the earlier walls do not show. Ovid's third age is the one in which men take up arms without yet losing all restraint, and that is what happens here. Warriors carry spoils and a crown toward a king on his throne, and the whole procession is ordered like a state ceremony. In the foreground, below all that movement, prisoners sit on the ground among the heaped armour that has already been taken off them.