Some Remarks about the Ceiling Painting of Bartolomeo Tarsia from the Dance Hall of the Great Peterhof Palace

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the painting ceiling created in the middle of the 18th century by the Venetian artist Bartolomeo Tarsia for the Dance Hall of the Great Peterhof Palace. The plafond was badly destroyed during the Second World War and was re-painted by Soviet artists in the second half of the last century from preserved pre-war photographs and a preparatory drawing. These documents formed the basis of our research. Starting from the 19th century, the subject of the plafond is interpreted mainly as “Apollo and the Muses on mount Parnassus”. An accurate examination and analysis of Tarsia’s preparatory drawing, along with an appeal to well-known prototypes from Western European painting, made it possible to come to some conclusions about the subject of the artwork, the nature of its iconography, and also to revise the established interpretation. In particular, we considered the problem of the iconography of Parnassus and Helikon, we also noted the co-presence on the ceiling of the figures of Minerva, the Muses and Pegasus, referring to one specific episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; it was also discovered that in the Tarsia’s native Republic of Venice — in Padua — there is a plafond by Giuseppe Le Gru, known as the “Triumph of the Sciences”, correlated in time of creation and content to Tarsia’s plafond. Like Parnassus, the subject with Minerva and/or Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon has an allegorical meaning — the prosperity and glory of the sciences and arts. The Peterhof plafond also has this allegorical character. The image of the supreme goddess Juno crowning the composition serves as an additional confirmation of this, and also allows us to attribute this ceiling to examples of the embodiment of female mythological iconography, which generally corresponds to the logic of the decorative decoration of the palace and corresponds to the spirit of the time. In addition, the possible parallels with other works of the middle of the 18th century, with which the Peterhof plafond shows ideological and compositional similarity, are proposed in the paper. Among such examples, there is one of the illustrations by Giambattista Piazzetta for the grandiose Venetian edition of “La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered)” by Torquato Tasso in 1745.