Allegory of Fragility

The work is an extraordinary example of a caprice, that is of a bizarre invention built up on an interweaving of allusions and allegorical references. “That putto hovering in the air seems to have come straight from a bacchanal: his face is already old, time-worn, with a nose out of proportion and very sad eyes; so the result cannot be other than grotesque. There is an air of sickness in the belly, an impudence in the way he moves forward in the air with a dancing step and a rather simpering expression” (Villa). Next to him, fragile soap bubbles burst in the air. At his feet, instead, is a realistic still life – perhaps by the Dutch painter Jacobus Victor – which unusually presents, alongside a naturalistic cabbage, noble fruits such as apples and limes, but rendered as though they were potatoes. On the wall in the background we can also see two ducks pecking at each other, completely uninterested in the scene.

The whole picture is an expression of human fragility: “what can be more vain, in this mixture of fleeting arrogance, of wasted youth and insipid old age, of uselessness and vulgarity?” (Villa).

The painting is one of the most unusual works by Giulio Carpioni, one of the favourite artists of private patrons in Vicenza in the seventeenth century, whom the artist succeeded in fascinating with an extremely wide and varied repertoire (religious subjects, portraits, genre scenes, internal décor). In his works Carpioni succeeded in combining an element of classicism, derived from Poussin, with a naturalistic tendency of his own which, in some works, such as in bacchanals, is pushed towards the grotesque.