The Age of Gold

In July 1637 Pietro da Cortona was passing through Florence, and Grand Duke Ferdinando II used the visit to put him to work on a small heated room beside his own bedroom. What he painted on these walls is usually counted the start of Roman Baroque mural painting in Florence. The subject came from Ovid, the four ages of the world, proposed for the room by the poet Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger. That same year Ferdinando married Vittoria della Rovere, and the wedding is written into this wall: a young couple sits courting under a great oak, the heraldic tree of the della Rovere family, with the Marzocco lion, the old emblem of Florence, beside them. Up in the branches a young man has climbed the oak to break off boughs and throw them down to a putto waiting below.