Just north of the city of Mantua is an enormous palace.
It's beautiful.
It's a series of courtyards and surrounding rooms, and some of it is quite quirky.
For instance, there's the Salon of the Horses, but the real star of this palace is one of the corner rooms.
This is the Room of the Giants.
This beautiful palace was designed by Giulio Romano as were the interior decorations.
Now, Giulio Romano was the principal, most talented student of Raphael.
And Raphael dies in 1520 and Romano finishes Raphael's work in Rome and then is invited to the court of Frederico II Gonzaga in Mantua.
As both an architect and as a painter. and an urban planner.
The rulers of Mantua have a long history of art patronage.
We can think back to Andrea Mantegna, who decorated the ducal palace, or Alberti, who built Sant'Andrea.
And in fact Mantegna's camera picta in the Palazzo Ducale.
The duke's palace is a tour de force that envelops the entire room in painting.
And what we're seeing here is something similar.
But while that painting was all about refinement and courtly manner, this painting couldn't be more different.
This room is perhaps the most surprising space to come out of the Renaissance.
You walk in and you are overwhelmed by these enormous figures, this incredible battle that's taking place.
Clouds and rocks and giants and gods.
It's absolutely overwhelming.
The space literally dissolves and you are in the middle of this battle.
The corners of the room dissolve because Romano has covered them in stucco, so we don't read the room as an architectural space.
And originally the floor itself would also have been covered in rough stone, mimicking what we see on the walls.
It's a traditional mytho-epic, where the giants vie with the gods of Mount Olympus for supremacy.
The giants are building an enormous stone mountain to reach the gods, but Zeus will have none of it.
And so here we see Jupiter being handed thunderbolts by his wife Juno, and he's hurling them down at the giants, his drapery flying back behind him.
Jupiter bends back the better to receive thunderbolts from Juno and then to throw them.
But look at his right leg and you get the sense that he's actually going to press against the cloud as if it was something firm to better throw them at the giants.
And the gods of Mount Olympus surround him and are partaking in the excitement of this battle below.
Some figures seem concerned about these usurpers, the giants, and some of them seem quite nonchalant, seemingly fully confident that Jupiter will prevail.
And he does.
Above Jupiter, we see an altar with an eagle on top, a symbol of Jupiter.
And then above that, a baldacchino.
And above that, an illusory coffered dome carried by columns.
So we have this reference to classical antiquity.
But we also have a reference to the nearby illusory dome painted by Andrea Mantegna in the Camera Picta.
But in this context it's utterly ridiculous, because you have these heavy stone columns, this heavy stone dome that's being supported on nothing but clouds, and below we see giants tumbling in every direction.
Buildings are tumbling down, rocks are falling.
The world of the giants is crumbling before our eyes.
There's none of that Renaissance interest in ideal beauty.
These figures are grotesque, in many cases ugly.
They're almost cartoonish.
They're overall.
There's a bombastic quality to this that makes it clear that this painting is meant to be entertaining.
And it really is.
You have every manner of giants falling, being crushed.
In fact, although there's plenty of boulders that are tumbling down, there are columns and classical architecture that's fracturing.
Really what this painting is showing is every manner of twisted body.
It's so interesting because here we are at the end of the Renaissance, or what we could call the late Renaissance or Mannerism, and all of what the Renaissance achieved in terms of being able to represent the body from so many different viewpoints and in motion is here exploited in this really complex composition where the artist is almost showing off his ability to not just do everything that the Renaissance artists did, but even more, in an entertaining and almost comedic manner.
You can see how small a human figure is in relationship to the giants, who are actually giant in this fresco.
But it's not just the scale, it's the immediate proximity of the very large figures as we stand in this room.
They're not painted overhead on the ceiling that is very distant from us.
We can stand right up to them and they are enormous.
The room is actually rather small.
And so we are in the center of this battle.
And the wall that I find particularly fascinating is the one that shows that classical architecture coming undone.
It's as though everything that the Renaissance had spent decades, or even centuries, to learn about ancient Roman architecture.
And here we see all of that knowledge crumbling In, and amongst that crumbling architecture we can see individual stones that are coming undone.
And I can imagine the entertainment as visitors to the palazzo would come into this room.
And then on their way out, they might perhaps walk out through the courtyard.
And that courtyard would have seemed quite classicizing and orderly.
But perhaps as they walk out one of the archways, they might look up and they might just notice that some of the triglyphs are slipping out of place, not represented in paint, like in the Room of the Giants, but represented by physical architecture.
That is, Giulio Romano, is creating this sort of playful note in the large courtyard.
That shows the disassembly of that classical tradition.
But the other irony here is that this is not stone at all.
This is brick faced with stucco made to look like stone.
Everything we're seeing is an illusion.
And so we're at this moment where an artist is able to step back.
The classical is no longer something that is merely revered.
It's something that has been fully embraced and now can be a playful element now, something that can be fun.
Well, and I think that it's important to see that within the context of the ducal court at Mantua.
And you have this noble family and those that they invite to the palace.
These are very well-educated, well-read noblemen and noblewomen.
They also know their classical architecture.
And, as you said, they walk out into the courtyard, they see those slipping triglyphs and they get the joke.
