Ceiling painting: Truth Pursued by Time

During his fifty-year reign (1680-1730) Vittorio Amadeo II transformed Turin, the second royal residence on Italian soil after Naples, into one of the most splendid Baroque cities in Europe. In 1584 he started the enlargement of the palace known as the Palazzo Reale. The additions to the palace were patterned after the models of French court architecture, but for the wall decorations he looked for Italian painters. The decoration continued under the reign of Carlo Emanuele III (1730-1773).

After the long reign of Carlo Emanuele III, his forty-eight-year-old son Vittorio AmadeoIII assumed the throne in 1773 In 1777 the new king, signaling a change in taste from Baroque to classicism, had the royal chambers on the piano nobile enriched by a ceiling painted by Laurent P�cheux, who, born in Lyon and influenced in Rome by Anton Raphael Mengs and Pompeo Batoni, was named “primo pittore di corte.” P�cheux required six years to paint the ceiling of the royal library. Here the break with the Baroque tradition and the return to the ideals of Bolognese classicism is manifested in the severe formal idiom, the fussy drawing, and the saturated colours.

The subject of the painting on the ceiling of the library is Truth Pursued by Time, is Placed under the Protection of Jupiter by Minerva. The ceiling arrangement is dominated by stucco caryatides and monochrome panels with friezelike, small-figured compositions all’antica. P�cheux provided a written explanation to the pictorial program, which he prefaced with the comment that painting in a royal palace must be instructive as well as decorative.