Garofalo, 'A Pagan Sacrifice', 1526

A young man pours an amphora of red wine onto the goat’s head on the altar; a young woman carries an upside-down torch, while an old woman balances a basket of pears, apples and grapes on her head. These elements probably carried a now obscure meaning understood by the erudite audience for which the picture was made. For many years the subject of this painting by Garofalo was believed to be a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the gods for the gifts of the fruit-bearing earth. Actually, it represents an ancient funeral.

The painting is based on an illustration that appears in a famous and quite strange antiquarian romance by Francesco Colonna called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in Venice in 1499. In the part of the book relating to this illustration, Colonna describes the cemetery of those who died for love. All the figures in the painting correspond to those in the woodcut illustration and described in Colonna’s text, although none are copied exactly.

There are few Renaissance paintings that follow a text as closely as this one does. However, it does not follow the woodcut illustration exactly. In the illustration, the altar carries the inscription in Latin: hail Valeria, most beloved of all, farewell. Here, only the date 1526 is inscribed in Roman numerals on the base. Also, in Colonna’s text the figures are all of carved marble; here, they are living figures who twist and turn in front of a distant landscape.

Garofalo’s painting was probably made for a specific setting as it is lit from the right – usually his smaller easel paintings were lit from the left. We do not know whether it was Garofalo’s erudite patron, possibly Alfonso I d‘Este, Duke of Ferrara, who suggested basing this painting on the Hypnerotomachia or whether Garofalo already knew of the book himself. It is not clear how familiar even an educated public would have been with it.

The female nude with the upside-down torch is closely related to a marble relief carving of Dido (Hester Diamond Collection, New York) by Giovanni Maria Mosca, one of a series depicting heroines from antiquity. Small reliefs of this type based on antique sculptures were made for the court in Ferrara where Garofalo worked, and it is possible he knew of the Dido and used it as a model for his painting.

Works with subjects based on ancient art and mythology were particularly fashionable among the educated patrons of the north Italian courts at this time. Alfonso I d’Este commissioned several for the Camerino d‘Alabastro (Alabaster Room) in his ducal palace in Ferrara, including Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, now in the National Gallery. Garofalo’s earliest surviving independent mythological painting is Minerva and Neptune (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), dated 1512, which was probably commissioned by Alfonso I d’Este. There are several other mythological paintings by Garofalo which also date from the 1520s.