Roman Art and the European Tradition
The art of ancient Rome, which very largely served as the basis of European Art still displays as one of its finest achievements the mural decoration known as “The Aldobrandini Wedding”. During the first century before Christ the city had arisen under the leadership of the Augustan Romans, to become the proud and wealthy capital of the most ambitious, scientific and powerful race Europe had yet known. Its achievement in constructive engineering, its wealth of architectural invention and display, and above all the sumptuous decoration and elegance of its palaces were famous in their own time and a legend of ever greater renown as the centuries wore on. The glories of Rome became something of a myth but also, by the devious ways of art, a practical basis of the European artistic tradition.
On the adoption of Rome as the capital of Christendom, the Church, on the iniative of its Popes and Cardinals, spent vast sums in commissioning artists to
embellish the walls of their churches and the reception rooms of their palaces. Botticelli and Perugino, Raphael and Michelangelo, who worked for the Vatican, can be seen as partaking of the single great panorama of Italian stemming from the Greaco-Roman tradition of which the “The Aldobrandini Wedding” is one of the noblest surviving representatives.
The picture is painted in fresco, virtually water color with white of egg applied to wet plaster. The light and the color are outatanding for their coolness and clarity. It is generally agreed that the eight figures, which are disposed as a frieze, represent the preparation of a bride for her wedding. The seated figure has been interpreted as Hymenaeus, god of marriage, and the lady attending the bride as Aphrodite, goddess of love. The figures on the right, chanting the bridal hymn.
http://howland.ws/ItalianArt/Index.htm
