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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

L'Allegoria del Purgatorio -- di Bellini, Milano

Speranza



All of Giovanni Bellini's gifts are compioned with particular success in his "Allegoria del Purgatorio", situated against some of the most beautiful realistic scenery possible, and in which we do no t know what we should amire most: the imagination, the sense of composition, the golden light or the lyricism.

The painting represents a stage in the pilgrimage of souls.

Having been purified in Purgatory, the souls have assumed the shape of innocdent children, and stop in the Garden of Paradise, paved with marble, where the Virgin, helped by St. Catherine of siena and St. Catherine of Alexandria, will decide their fate while a child gathers the fruits of the tree of life.

In the middle distance flows the river Lethe, on whose banks an ass, a sheep and a dog symbolise patience, humility and abstinence.

This mingling of a religioius theme and such mythological elements as Lethe renders the feeling of an age that hoped to reconcile Platonic philosophy with the teaching of Christ.

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