The Rape of the Sabine Women

By 1613 three scenes of the cycle were finished on these walls. Then the work stopped for more than 20 years. When Giuseppe Cesari came back to the hall and painted this episode, in 1635 and 1636, he was in his late sixties.

Livy tells the story. Romulus's new city had men but few women, and the neighbouring peoples refused to let their daughters marry there. So the Romans invited the Sabines and other neighbours to a festival of games, and at a signal the young men seized the Sabine girls.

Painting in Rome had moved on while the hall waited. Around 1630 the young Pietro da Cortona had painted the same subject on a large canvas for the Sacchetti family. That picture now belongs to the Capitoline, which presents him as the first true representative of the new Baroque style. And in the same years that Cesari worked here, the studio of Gian Lorenzo Bernini was making a marble statue of the reigning pope, Urban VIII, for this hall, between 1635 and 1640. It stands against the short wall, directly below this fresco.