Minerva,

1506 or 1509

This fresco once adorned the palace of the tyrant Pandolfo Petrucci in Siena. A personification of Prudence and another, unidentified figure from the same decorative cycle are also in the Museum’s collection. Minerva, her shield emblazoned with the Gorgon’s head, wears a breastplate with a candelabrum shape, a Renaissance adaptation of an ancient ornament. To her left, the upper bodies of children, with chicken feet and wings, protrude from vines. The simulated mosaic background indicates that these hybrid creatures exist on another level of reality and are part of the architectural framework. Siena was among the first artistic centers that responded to the discovery of Nero’s Golden House in Rome in the late fifteenth century; its artists were inspired by the wall paintings, which offered a new decorative mode sanctioned by antiquity. These new works were called “grotesques,” from their source in grottoes (subterranean rooms).