The story
On the Hell Staircase at Burghley House, the ceiling opens into the mouth of hell, painted as the gaping jaws of an enormous cat with tormented souls inside. Next door, in the Heaven Room, gods and goddesses cover the walls as well as the ceiling. Both are the work of Antonio Verrio, an Italian decorative painter, hired in the 1690s by John Cecil, 5th Earl of Exeter, who remade the state rooms in the Baroque taste he had absorbed on repeated journeys to Italy. The same earl collected some 300 works of art.
The house itself is a century older. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, chief minister to Elizabeth I, built it between 1555 and 1587 on the edge of Stamford in Lincolnshire, and from outside it still looks like the Elizabethan prodigy house he intended, a skyline of towers, chimneys and stone turrets. His descendants still live here.
The picture many visitors now come for arrived later. Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, a leading painter of the Italian Baroque, is signed with her name and dated 1622. It appears in the house inventory of 1763, probably bought on the Grand Tour by Brownlow Cecil, the 9th Earl, and it was once attributed to Caravaggio. Outside, Capability Brown, the landscape gardener, reshaped the park and dug a lake of 26 acres in the late 1770s.
