This is a sketch of the fresco that Corrado Giaquinto painted in the former stairway at the Madrid’s Royal Palace, which is now the Hall of Columns. That fresco, his last work at the Royal Palace, is undoubtedly one of the finest paintings from Giaquinto’s Spanish period.He concluded it in 1762, so the sketch presented here must have been made slightly earlier. At the top is the figure of Apollo,
An accomplished heir to the Neapolitan tradition of Luca Giordano, Giaquinto reveals the extensive influence of Giordano’s figure types in this Adoration of the Shepherds. In the centre of the composition the infant Christ becomes a powerful source of radiated light which bathes the faces of the figures grouped around the manger.
This allegorical work, signed on the column lying on the ground in the centre of the composition, shows two women in Roman garb sitting on clouds. Representing Justice and Peace, they embrace and seem about to kiss each other. This pictorial motif could be used to express political peace or, as is the case here, to allude to the peaceful policies that characterised the reign of Ferdinand VI, for w
La figura coronada, arrodillada sobre nubes, de perfil hacia la izquierda. Considerado un tiempo como preparatorio para la figura de España en el fresco de Giaquinto que decora la escalera principal del Palacio Real de Madrid, fue correctamente identificado por A.E. Pérez Sánchez como preparatorio para la figura de Santa Catalina en un cuadro del artista con la aparición de la Virgen y el Niño a l