The Fall of the Giants

Jupiter is seen throwing his thunderbolt down through the entire ceiling of the room, catching the rebellious giants mid-air, and tumbling through the room with the weight of mountains piled on them as they fell, taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, but painted here at a size that makes the whole room feel like the myth, rather than a picture of it. In Ovid's account, Perino is so faithful as to indicate that Jupiter fought the giants without the help of the other Olympian gods, and adds the detail (taken from another ancient source) of the giants using uprooted trees and boulders as weapons, which demonstrates that he was working meticulously with multiple classical texts and not simply drawing on a “simplified” version of the story. Remarkably well preserved for a fresco of this size, the ceiling was painted for a room that was briefly used as a temporary throne room on the occasion of the visit of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to Genoa, and recent scholarship has suggested that the fresco's apparent glorification of the Emperor's victory over rebellion may cover up a more ambiguous and subtly critical undercurrent, expressed using rhetorical paradoxes as in courtly literature of the time, which would give Perino plausible deniability if he were to pick up on the criticism an alert viewer might make. A number of preparatory drawings have been preserved that record the development of the composition prior to the actual painting on the ceiling itself, including a few that are now in Princeton University and reproduced in a period engraving in the Metropolitan Museum, providing surprisingly rich, cross-referenced visual evidence of the development of the particular ceiling design.