The Age of Iron

This is the end of Ovid's sequence, the age when nothing holds. A man is being murdered beneath a row of columns, a bound victim waits his turn, a woman pleads for him, and behind them on the right a city burns. Cortona painted it in 1641, in the same campaign as the Bronze Age wall. What is strange is where it is. The room was the Grand Duke's stove room, a small chamber heated on the Roman principle and used for bathing, so Ferdinando II sat in the steam with the collapse of the world in front of him and his own golden age, painted four years earlier, behind his shoulder.