Allegory with a Woman in Roman Dress on a Triumphal Chariot

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

Religion, piracy, and print technology intersect in Allaert Claesz’s reinvention of a detail from Marcantonio Raimondi’s Quos Ego , itself after Raphael, from the poet Virgil’s Trojan War epic. Raimondi’s print showed the goddess Venus pleading with Jupiter for her son Aeneas’s life, so that he can fulfill his destiny of founding Rome. Rather than reusing this pagan content in an exact reverse copy, Claesz has instead turned it into a Christian Triumph. God the Father and the crucified Christ appear in a formerly blank bank of clouds, and the woman’s hand stretches out to them in praise, rather than to Jupiter in supplication.

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