Posted on 05/20/2010 9:26:50 PM PDT by Salvation
This fresco depicts the two last episodes from the story of the life of Peter: to the right we see him, with St Paul, in his dispute with Simon Magus in front of the Emperor; to the left, his Crucifixion.Recently it was suggested that Masaccio had originally painted the last scene of the cycle, the Crucifixion of Peter. But that fresco was then destroyed when the Madonna del Popolo was placed on the altar, so that when Filippino was called in to complete the unfinished cycle and repair the damaged sections, he was also asked to add the scene of the death of Peter on the empty wall space.
Among the portraits Filippino has included in his fresco, the most interesting are the following: a selfportrait (the first figure to the left, looking towards the spectator); the first man to the right of the three men standing between St Peter and Nero is Antonio del Pollaiolo, while the one to the left is probably Raggio, a merchant's broker mentioned by Vasari, and not Botticelli as had been suggested previously; whereas in the group of three to the right in the Crucifixion of Peter, the man looking towards the audience is probably Botticelli.
My sources are all public. I use unbound.biola.edu for the translations. One can use the same source for many other translations, compare them and that way learn a classic language. The original impulse to make these posts was for myself to learn Latin by osmosis, and that somewhat succeeded. I later added the religious art and patristic readings.
For the Catena Aurea I use www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php. This is not the best source, as it could use some corrective editing, -- it apparently came from an optical scan. But that is the only one available online that I could find.
I use diverse sources for art, but primarily, it is www.wga.hu.
For everyday Douay reading I use www.drbo.org. This loads very fast and has a reliable search engine.
Occasionally, for help with Greek and Latin, I use www.perseus.tufts.edu.
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