On the day of Europe’s most valuable horse race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, this week’s picture shows part of the east wall of the sala dei cavalli – the “room of the horses” – in the Palazzo Te in Mantua. Painted by Giulio Romano and his assistants for Federigo Gonzaga towards the end of the 1520s, these frescoed decorations celebrate the beauty of the thoroughbred horse with High Renaissance pomp and panache. 

The sala dei cavalli is one of a suite of rooms created by Giulio Romano in the palace on the isola del Te – formerly an island in a lake, now a traffic island in the suburban sprawl of the town – which he designed for the proud ruler of Mantua. The rooms are decorated by all manner of fanciful and complicated allegories, heaping iconographically intricate praise on the Gonzaga dynasty. They culminate in the tour-de-force of the sala dei giganti, the “room of the giants”, painted to simulate a collapsing temple, in the ruins of which the crushed bodies of assorted pop-eyed ogres writhe. Giulio’s febrile wit and invention made him famous. His contemporary, the artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, wrote that he had made a building fit for gods to inhabit. Giulio also happens to be the only Renaissance painter mentioned by Shakespeare.

The decoration reproduced here is sober by comparison with that in much of the rest of the palace, partly because the room’s theme required the artist to rein in his fantasy and provide his patron with accurate, near-life-size portrayals of his six principal stallions. Stabled, in reality, just around the corner from the room containing these representations, the horses were the pride of the Gonzaga, who rode them to battle, raced them to victory and bred from them...

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