Category:Allegoria della vita umana (Guido Cagnacci)

Oil on canvas. 110 x 86.5 cm. Private Collection (Fondazione Cavallini Sgarbi). С. 1650

Copy in Crocker Art Museum (California)

https://www.cinello.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Corriere-della-Sera-9.6.19.pdf

This is one of the principal paintings in the career of Guido Cagnacci; it was already recognised as such during the 17th century when it was prominently displayed in the Palazzo Magnani in Bologna. When Senator Magnani commissioned Gian Gioseffo Del Sole (1654–1719) to paint a Divine Love as a companion piece, Del Sole’s effort, despite his great talent, faded to insignificance next to Cagnacci’s Allegory (Zanotti 1739, I, p. 306; Pasini 1986, pp. 255–59). Indeed, this buoyant young woman is one of the most realistic and unshamedly erotic nudes ever painted by an Italian old master.

What Caravaggio had done for the male nude, Cagnacci now accomplished for the female: both painters declined to stylise their naked models. As a twenty-year-old graduate of Guido Reni’s workshop, Cagnacci had gone to Rome at the height of Caravaggio’s revolutionary influence. He was deeply impressed. Not until Courbet in the 19th century do we sense as we do in Cagnacci’s Allegory that the artist’s intention is to transform a portrait of his studio model, posed completely nude, into a work of art.

The nude young woman is surrounded by symbols of time’s passage and the decay of all things. The painting would be a straightforward discourse on vanitas — replete with guttering candles, hourglass, flowers, skull, and ruined block of architecture — were it not for the serpent suspended in the air. The snake that devours its own tail to sustain its life is the ouroboros, an ancient symbol of the cyclical regeneration of life out of death. This Allegory of Human Life thus appears to be a unique proposal of an “anti-vanitas”. Instead of the standard lament that “all is for naught”, Cagnacci maintains that feminine pulchritude and fecundity are fundamental to the eternal cycle of creation. https://nga.gov.au/theitalians/detail.cfm?IRN=161279&ViewID=2

The pictures for which he was most renowned, and for which he is now most commonly recognised, were overtly sensuous, beguiling and provocative. As with many of his successful compositions from the 1640s onwards, which demonstrate the influence of both Guido Reni’s idealism and Caravaggio’s naturalism, this painting has a female nude as its central motif. The subject has long been considered to be an allegory of life, with the woman surrounded by objects that symbolise mortality. The rose, the hourglass and the skull were frequently used in vanitas still lifes, each reminders of the transience of life. Above the figure’s head is a serpent that bites its own tail: at first glance it appears like a halo, perhaps an intentionally subversive gesture on the part of Cagnacci. This snake symbol is an ouroboros (or uroboros), representing the desire for immortality and eternity. It is a symbol with ancient roots, found on a shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamen from thirteenth century B.C. Egypt, a likely reference to the everlasting nature of time, but in Cagnacci’s lifetime it was better known as a key emblem in alchemy. It was found in important texts of the period, such as Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens, 1617. Cagnacci brings together the esoteric and the erotic to create a composition that clearly proved popular, with Pasini (op. cit.) noting that the composition gained early praise from Gian Piero Zanotti, who mentioned, in 1739, a work by Cagnacci showing La vita umana, calling it ‘una cosa divina’. Pasini himself lists three autograph versions, dating the composition to the 1640s, but suggests this picture is in his view the ‘best version […] and the most intensely expressive’ (ibid.). https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/guido-cagnacci-santarcangelo-di-romagna-1601-1663-vienna-6152942-details.aspx

In Allegory of Life, Guido Cagnacci has depicted a semi-nude woman surrounded by images of mortality: a rose, a skull, and an hourglass. Her gaze is lifted up to an unusual image in the upper left corner of the canvas--an uroboros, a serpent biting its own tail. Using the uroboros enabled Cagnacci to express mankind's desire for the infinite and immortality with a single simple image. The snake biting its tail represents the eternity denied us in this life and the full potential of the limitless cosmos of the divine. The uroboros in Allegory of Life was almost certainly based on the description of the "hieroglyph" of the snake biting its tail in Horapollon's Hieroglyphica. Cagnacci probably used the popular Italian translation published in Venice in 1547 by Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari. (Colleen Manassa) https://echoesofegypt.peabody.yale.edu/egyptosophy/allegory-life