| Abstrakt: |
The Fall of the Giants(1530–33), a ceiling fresco by Perino del Vaga (1501–46), has always been understood as an allegory glorifying Emperor Charles V (1500–1556). I argue that it may also be read conversely as a carefully veiled expression of criticism. Although any denigration of the emperor is surprising at the hand of the painter who served as court artist for Andrea Doria, the emperor’s admiral, Perino nonetheless inserted subversive elements of criticism into the ceiling painting. Perino employed the technique of rhetorical paradox, which was common in the literature of the time and widely used in courtly games. Just like in the verbal rhetorical paradox, in which multiple disjunctive strands of meaning are presented to the reader/listener simultaneously, the spectators of this painting can decipher hints of contradicting significance in myriad details of the fresco’s iconography that have multivalent meanings. Perino was thereby able to achieve plausible deniability, and any criticism of the emperor or of Doria that the astute observer might have glimpsed in the fresco would have stayed unspoken. Acknowledging this subversive dynamics might shed new light on the artist–patron relationship in the sixteenth century. |
