Room leading into the Gallery

Described in eighteenth-century inventories as a sparsely furnished room with a small scagliola table, this space likely originally served as a small study or simply a passageway to access the private chapel dedicated to Saint Peter Martyr.

The current fresco wall decoration displays an intricate architectural framework covering the walls entirely, characterized by mixtilinear Doric pilasters surmounted by an architrave with a projecting cornice decorated with rosettes. Above this, a series of volute frames adorn small landscape views, alternating with brackets featuring frontal leaf decorations. The narrow southern wall differs from this layout with architectural frames offering a glimpse of an Italian garden. The latter is painted with great care and appears animated by a gentleman and a lady, accompanied by a servant holding a parasol. The garden seems to slope gently down towards a grove, beyond which the facade of an imposing building is visible, featuring a sequence of statues set in round-arched niches. Alongside the three figures animating the scene, there is a barely sketched line drawing of a fourth figure, while at their feet, an unknown vandal hand has written: “Va là che va’ bene” [approx. “Go on, it’s fine”].

As in other rooms on the piano nobile, this room also features simulated paintings positioned above the doorways. These, rendered with octagonal frames, depict pairs of putti immersed in wooded landscapes. In the first, a cherub dressed in red drops his bow to the ground to take a palm leaf from the hands of another blue-robed cherub, who has a typically feminine hairstyle. In the second panel, however, the same two putti face each other with bows drawn, but the one dressed in red has already been struck in the heart. The placement of these two subjects in the corner adjacent to the “Chapel” has led some critics to suggest they might represent the allegory of Sacred and Profane Love. The red-clad putto, indeed, seems intent on stealing the palm representing the primacy of divine love over the human heart from the other cherub, who appears defeated in the direct confrontation (the blue-clad putto). With these paintings, therefore, the artist may have intended to represent the temptation of humankind, and of Count Arese himself, towards mortal passions, and the sin of man in thinking his own will is more just than the divine one. A will that, sometimes, in its infinite goodness, can seem painful and unbearable to humans, such as upon the death of a child or a loved one.

It is in this sense, therefore, that the room’s decorative scheme should be interpreted, showing the clash between the two angels to symbolize Bartolomeo III Arese’s reluctance to fully accept the celestial will.