National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Three Centuries of Italian Art

In Florence, del Sarto probably worked from a life sketch but often departed from the ‘coloured drawing’ and composed his paintings using patches of colour and shade. The Madonna, perhaps modeled on his wife, occupies a compressed space between green curtains and a stone parapet as she supports a child of classical rather than natural proportions. His twisting pose and the strong colours point the way to Mannerism.

Time with a scythe to cut short time unveils Truth who holds the sun in her left hand while old Lies tumbles from a cloud. This allegory extols the virtues of Tiepolo’s patron, a prominent lawyer, who commissioned it for the ceiling of a vast hall. Tiepolo was a master of Venetian 18th century Rococo ceiling painting.

At a time when most of the contemporary art was allegorical and decorative Longhi’s scenes of 18th century life were a novelty. Working in an almost miniaturist tradition he painted well-to-do Venetians in the comfort of their drawing rooms. Based on careful drawings he captures the appearance and dress of this unidentified noble family and thereby presents a valuable visual social history.

This is one of nine mythological scenes commissioned to celebrate a marriage. The supreme Greek god Zeus has transformed into a friendly bull to abduct the daughter of the King of Tyre (modern day Lebanon) across the sea to Crete. Figures are dramatically placed in the foreground in luminous colour.

A nymph is a goddess of mountains, forests, meadows and water, all of which appear in this poetic work. A musical conversation flows between the lute, the reed and the viol players.The lute player is modelled on a figure in a painting by Ludovico Carracci.

Guercino began his academic training in the Carracci academy and became a master Baroque painter. Shepherds contemplate the after-life expressed in the motto on the stone monument. The mouse and the fly with the skull reinforce the earthly realism of the scene and the dialogue between man and nature.

Reni dominated the Bolognese school in the 17th century and boasted he ‘could paint heads with their eyes uplifted a hundred different ways’ to express divine inspiration. Mary Magdalene in the grotto of St Baume devoted herself for 30 years in penance, living frugally on root vegetables.