Aurora

This ceiling painting represents Apollo-Helios on the Chariot of the Sun Led by Aurora Followed by the Horae.

A narrative scene painted on a wall as a framed picture was referred to as a “quadro riportato,” which to seventeenth-century thinking suggested that a framed panel painting had been translated into the medium of fresco. If a picture with the perspective of a panel painting is shifted to the ceiling, it is called a “quadro finto” (fictious picture). In such a case the painted architectural framing is replaced by a painted or three-dimensional picture frame; Guido Reni’s Aurora in the Casino Pallavicini-Rospiglioso is a clear example of this approach. Here the monumentality of the figures, meant to be seen up close, largely eliminates the picture space, which is only suggested as a horizon.