Art and Moral Censorship in Early 17th-Century Rome: Annibale Carracci (but also Caravaggio) in Bellori’s Vite

In 1657, Giovan Pietro Bellori published his iconographic interpretation of the cycle of the Loves of the Gods painted by Annibale (and Agostino) Carracci in the vault of the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, which was later taken up and perfected in the biography of the artist published in his Vite in 1672. The author offered an edifying reading of those frescoes with an essentially erotic theme, which was then rejected or accepted from time to time, in a profusion of critical interventions. This reading – in the author’s opinion – must be judged as a typical intervention of moralisation and censorship, directed not only at the work but also at the artist, according to that mechanism of identification of one with the other that, unfortunately, in our age of cancel culture is gaining strength and credibility, and that Bellori applied above all to the case of Caravaggio. About the cycle in the Galleria Farnese, it is possible that the responsibility for this act of censorship was not entirely Bellori’s, since this process of moralisation had perhaps already been initiated by the patron of the frescoes, Cardinal Odoardo Farnese himself, some twenty years after the execution of that masterpiece.