Corrado Giaquinto, 'Apotheosis of the Spanish (?) Monarchy (?)', about 1751

This preparatory sketch for a ceiling shows a sky with classical figures arranged on clouds. At the top is Jupiter, the chief deity, seated alongside his wife Juno. They are accompanied by their attributes: an eagle and thunderbolt for Jupiter and a peacock for Juno. Below them to the left are Venus and Cupid, and a reclining Bacchus crowned with vine leaves and holding a thyrsus, or staff. To their right, Minerva presents a woman holding a spear to Jupiter: she may be a personification of Spain. Lower and to the centre, Hercules is defeating the multi-headed water monster Hydra with his club. His prominent position is due to his association with the Spanish monarchy – one of Hercules’s labours was to place columns in Gibraltar, marking the limit of what would later become the Spanish Empire.

The ceiling painting, for which this is a sketch, is now in the Palazzo Rondinini-Sanseverino, Rome, but it was originally in the Palazzo Santa Croce in Palermo. The palace belonged to the Celesti family: they may have commissioned this allegory of the Spanish monarchy since the Spanish Bourbon king Charles III, who was ruler of the Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, was crowned in Palermo. The floor of the hall in the Palazzo Santa Croce where the ceiling painting was first installed is inscribed: ‘1751’, providing an approximate date for this work.

The design here is shaped to reflect the form of the ceiling on which the final painting would go: a similarly shaped ceiling canvas by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is in our collection. The painting technique in this sketch is so free that certain details, such as the figures' features, are merely suggested through short rapid strokes. The loose handling is especially evident in the background figures, which are less worked up and in a much more limited colour range than those painted in delicate hues in the foreground. A sketch such as this would have been an initial phase in working up a design and would have been followed by a more detailed painted study, or modello, such as was the case for Giaquinto’s modelli for the frescoes in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome.