The Birth of Pandora

Abstract

In a letter from Rome addressed to his patron Edmund Burke in about 1770 (1: 178), James Barry discusses the shortcomings of Raphael’s Cupid and Psyche frescoes in the Villa Farnesina. The subject of one of these frescoes, The Council of the Gods (Figure 22), required Raphael to represent a gathering of all the deities of Olympus; but the work, Barry argues, shows Raphael to have had only the most uncertain understanding of the different physical characters of the Olympians. This was not, however, his fault: the greatest antique statues were yet to be discovered when Raphael was painting, and the knowledge of classical literature was not what it had since become. Indeed, so great had been the advancement of classical knowledge since the early sixteenth century that a modern painter could now hope to challenge Raphael in the representation of the pagan divinities, if he could find a similar subject, one in which ‘all the gods and goddesses of antiquity’ could put in an appearance. And Barry claims to have found just such a subject: it was (though he does not say so) the story of the birth of Pandora, as described by Hesiod in the Works and Days (lines 57–101). In 1775 he exhibited at the Royal Academy a drawing, now lost, entitled Pandora; the exhibit was no doubt both an invitation to prospective patrons, who might consider commissioning the large picture of Pandora that Barry had in mind, and an attempt to warn off other painters from a subject which, he believed, ‘included the whole of the art’ of painting (2: 383).¹