Women Bathing in a Classical Arcade

A pioneering painter of ancient ruins and capriccios, Codazzi worked in Naples and Rome on commissions for elite patrons and works for the open market. Views of a men’s bath and a women’s bath—interiors based on ancient texts and reconstructed ruins—were exceptions in his oeuvre, but artists following him exploited the theme. Here, an architectural capriccio is derived from the grand, open-air arcade in Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens (Vatican), but the scale is diminished, befitting this bath for a few modern women (the herringbone bricks on the floor of the foreground pool are a nod to antiquity, but the seventeenth-century dresses indicate contemporary times.) The sense of classical calm is broken by a bather who catches sight of a male interloper and turns to flee, like an ancient nymph of Diana spying unlucky Actaeon.