Two paintings currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide a glimpse of the achievements and the variety of subjects in seventeenth-century Italian painting. A fertile and creative artistic environment gave birth to some of the greatest talents in Western art that, like constellations of bright stars, cause us to stop and stare nearly four hundred years later.

Alongside scenes from the Bible and saints’ lives were those from ancient mythology, such as Danaë. Confined to a tower as a virgin by her father, the king, because of a prophecy that he would be killed by the son she would bear, Danaë is visited by the god Jupiter, who appears as a shower of gold and lays with her for the night. Their son, Perseus, grows to one day behead Medusa and to accidentally kill his grandfather.

Orazio Gentileschi (b.1563) dramatizes the story’s key event with mannerist effect. His “Danaë” (ca.1621) shows the princess full and fertile, the classical ideal, reclining on a royal bed against the enveloping shadows as a putto clumsily raises the heavy drapery, bathed in the light of the divine. The veil separating the worlds of gods and men is, in effect, momentarily lifted as Danaë reaches out in passion to her immortal lover.

The opulent surfaces are all quite specific and highly rendered and serve as a kind of stage set, presenting Danaë against a background of deeply shadowed velvet. The putto’s wings are closely based on actual birds’ wings, the downy feathers of a noticeably different sort than the long flight feathers. Naturalistic light illuminates bodies and objects while dramatizing the event.

The contemplative and symbolic “Saint Dominic in Penitence” (no date given) by Filippo Tarchiani (b.1576) shows the founder of the Dominican Order kneeling before a crucifix and small wooden altar which is adorned with a modest bouquet of flowers and a delicate linen runner. Before him is an open prayer book and a skull which, like death itself, waits in the shadows, outlasting both flowers and penitent. The altar is symbolic of the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, Golgotha (meaning “the place of the skull”).

Dominic’s tunic is pulled down around his waist as he scourges himself with a small cord, twisting his torso slightly toward us. His halo is suggested by a subtle, naturalistic edge of reflection, like the arc of a shooting star and, indeed, a small starburst sparkles at its front edge. According to The Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century compendium of saint’s lives and hagiography, when the infant Dominic’s godmother “lifted him from the sacred font, it seemed to her that he had on his forehead a brilliant star which shed its light over the whole world.”

The top right corner of the picture plane is a square of open window with the subdued blue of half-light. An hourglass and a large book, presumably a bible, sit on a nearby table. The simple geometry of the wall, floor, table, altar, shadow, and the quiet blue of the window, emphasizes the saint’s figure.

The close study of anatomy and the human figure was among the great inheritances of the Renaissance. The artist’s palette of the seventeenth-century would likely include lead white, lead yellow, vermillion, red lake, earth colors, and carbon black, in the expressive medium of oil, to create figures and scenes which play before the dark recesses of their shadowed interiors.

The Metropolitan Museum’s Expanded, Renovated, and Reinstalled European Paintings Galleries, 1250-1800 features generous loans of works by Gentileschi, Ribera, Botticelli, and others alongside more than 700 paintings from the permanent collection, and is currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY – metmuseum.org, 212-535-7710.

More information about Robert Edward Bullock’s work can be found at bullockonline.com