La lotta

Michiel Sweerts was a Fleming working in Rome around 1648, and he liked painting things other artists thought beneath them. Public wrestling matches were held right in the city's streets, drawing loud crowds, the kind of rough entertainment usually left to painters of low genre scenes. Sweerts took the subject and lifted it. He scaled his wrestlers up into large, near-nude figures and posed them after antique sculpture, so that two men grappling in the dirt carry the weight of classical heroes. The strong, raking light freezes them mid-hold, more monument than brawl, and even the onlookers seem hushed. Sweerts made several paintings of these Roman wrestlers, giving a street scuffle the seriousness a history painter would save for a battle.