Semele’s Room

The “Hall of Semele” is one of the crossroads between the different ritual paths of approach to the various sectors that originally made up the palace. In fact, it concludes the area that constituted the Vestibule and introduces the “grand representation” area, so much so that in some documents this environment is also mentioned as “Antechamber.”
The simple pavilion vault without lunettes is decorated in the center by a frescoed medallion attributed by critics to Giuseppe Nuvolone (1619-1793) and depicting “Semele struck by lightning by Jupiter.” In the painting, the father of the gods appears seated on a cloud, holding the unleashed lightning bolts in his hand, while an eagle appears at his feet. In front of him stands a young woman who falls backwards, bringing her left hand to her forehead. Eros, who appears in the lower left corner of the composition with his quiver full of arrows and his bow disassembled, covers his face with his hands so as not to look, while a cherub seems to arrive on the scene from the opposite corner of the painting to prevent the worst from happening. Mythological tales, in fact, narrate that Semele, daughter of the king of Thebes Cadmus, died incinerated by the lightning of Jupiter after imploring him to show himself to her in all his power. From their union, however, Dionysus-Bacchus was born, who was saved only thanks to the intervention of his father who promptly extracted the fetus from the burning maternal womb, to insert it into his thigh, in which he remained until the moment of birth.

The imprudence of the god’s young lover is, therefore, to be read as an invitation to the guests of the palace to maintain due respect and decorum with the master of the house, whose trust and munificence had to be constantly earned and deserved, without ever forgetting the power that he had reached and that had been granted to him by divine will.
By carefully observing the painting, moreover, attentive guests could once again grasp the clear political vision of the Arese family, who here reaffirmed their loyalty to Spain. Jupiter, in fact, is depicted with the features of Philip IV of Habsburg, King of Spain and Governor of Milan, known to his contemporaries as a man extremely attentive to protocol, a lover of royal dignity and impassive in public. A king, therefore, not very accustomed in adulthood to frivolities and whose manifestations of anger were to be feared.

The vault of the hall is decorated with a rich stucco frame that frames the fresco and that, at the four corners, presents heraldic references to the Arese, Omodei, Odescalchi and Legnani families. The decorative system is completed by the eighteenth-century depictions of cornucopias full of fruit and with an evident heraldic-Borromean layout.