Allegory of Winter
1819. Oil on canvas.Not on display
Together with the collection on The Hours of the Day (Las Horas del Día) for the decoration of the Real Casino (also known as Casino de la Reina), the allegories of the different seasons of the year form one of the most interesting collections of this genre in Spanish neoclassical painting. Its most immediate predecessor in Spain is to be found in the canvases painted by Mengs for the Queen´s Dressing Room in Palacio Real de Madrid, although their composition and iconography are quite different. The canvases painted by Madrazo and Ribera for the Casino are a reflection of the fashion for this type of allegory of temporal cycles, emanating from France around the time of the Revolution, where artists were reviving models of decorative figures in flight from classical Roman painting and sculpture, especially the reliefs of the Basilica of Porta Maggiore in Rome. Their models would flood Europe with a taste for the Empire style in paintings and prints of the most diverse nature, but almost always repeating very similar compositional schemes, to which Flaxman´s models are no strangers.
