Adventures of the gods

The Christian Church sought to banish the ancient gods, but their fascination proved too strong. Their reappearance in their many manifestations during the Renaissance transformed Western visual culture, reviving, nourishing and sustaining the nude and the erotic as legitimate subjects of art.

How the antique gods and demigods descended to earth again, enlivening panels, canvases, furniture, cameos, jewels, medals, ceramics, prints, and as sculptures, is now unfolded in a thought-provoking exhibition of more than 200 pieces at Palazzo Pitti.

The seeds of the revival of ancient mythology were sown in the Middle Ages. Pagan authors were still read as part of the study of Latin, including Ovid, whose Metamorphoses comprised the most extensive single compendium of the lives and loves of the gods. Mediaeval writers and encyclopaedists tended to treat the old gods and heroes as historical figures, and it became fashionable for cities and leading families to trace their genealogies back to these mythical ancestors.

Mediaeval miniaturists also kept alive images of the pagan gods in illuminated manuscripts. During the 15th century, the gods and their escapades began to adorn with increasing frequency cassoni, elaborate chests often forming part of dowries or wedding gifts, painted panels and bedroom furniture. The loves of Zeus/Jove for demigods, nymphs and humans, and the animal and other guises he assumed to have his way with them, were particular favourites: notably the stories of Leda and the Swan, Europa and the Bull and Danae and the Shower of Gold. The representation of these divine acts of coitus may well have had talismanic values associated with fertility and child-bearing. And perhaps in the presence of these symbols every Italian husband could fancy himself a Jove and every wife a goddess or nymph.

Bedrooms and the more private parts of the house and country villas where life was less formal were thought the most appropriate locations for this burgeoning mythological and erotic art.