Apollo slaying Coronis

The Greek sun god Apollo tumbles from the sky to shoot his unfaithful lover, Coronis (Ovid, ‘Metamorphoses’ 2:600 ff).This is one of ten frescoes by Domenichino and assistants which originally adorned the walls of a room known as the Stanza di Apollo in a garden pavilion in the grounds of the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, near Rome. Eight of the frescoes were transferred to canvas and are now in our collection. The iconographical scheme of the pavilion was conceived by Domenichino’s friend Giovanni Battista Agucchi, both to glorify the Aldobrandini family and to express their philosophical and religious ideas. Agucchi’s intellectual programme used classical stories to symbolise contemporary ideas. Apollo was not just the god of the sun, music, poetry and art, but by extension the light of reason. The scenes in the Stanza express the triumph of reason. Many of the stories, including this one, were taken from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses.Domenichino was responsible for designing the frescoes, many of which he based on illustrations in sixteenth-century printed editions of the Metamorphoses. He may have used Antonio Tempesta’s edition, published in Italy in 1606, but he revised the compositions to make them clearer and changed their format from horizontal to vertical (in order to fit the pavilion’s walls).This painting was originally on the right-hand wall of the Stanza. Some of Domenichino’s preparatory drawings for it survive: there is a detailed pen and ink drawing for this composition in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, along with chalk studies for individual figures. Although clearly designed by Domenichino, by the time work reached the right-hand side of the room he was busy with other projects, and much of the actual painting was left to assistants.