Article
Newsletter: Fall 2006
While violence is imminent in Pietro da Cortona's Saint Martina Refuses to Adore the Idols, it takes center stage in his preliminary sketch for the Age of Iron, one of four frescoes in the Sala della Stufa in the Palazzo Pitti, Aorence-a project commissioned in 1637 by Duke Ferdinando II de' Medici that Cortona completed in 1640. The overall theme of the cycle, the Four Ages of the World, derives from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the creation of the world was followed by four ages: Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. The Iron age was characterized by greed, pillage, and murder, which Cortona spotlights in the foreground of his flurried composition, where a soldier raises his sword against a defenseless woman and her children. In the background, another soldier attacks a Christian priest, identified as such by the small crucifixes indicated at the left margin. This anachronism is corrected in the fresco itself, where the statue of a goddess under a portico identifies the building as a pagan temple.
