The Creation's room in Palazzo Poggi: new suggestions

Abstract

The article examines from an iconographic and stylistic point of view the pictorial decoration of the so-called Creation Room, located inside the ancient Bolognese Palace of Cardinal Giovanni Poggi. The small setting, currently an integral part of the University Library of Bologna, contains a painted wooden ceiling decorated with grotesque motifs, where there is a depiction of three of the six days required for the Creation of man narrated in the Book of Genesis flanked by other anthropomorphic figures, with whom they are linked in an iconological relationship. The story continues in the painted frieze on the upper part of the walls, which is divided into nine compartments and displays the events of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel and Tobit. Therefore, the Old Testament is the main source of inspiration for the artists who worked here in the late 1560s - early 1570s, probably related to the workshop of Cesare Baglione, tireless painter who dictated his own stylistic koinè in Bologna during the crucial years leading up to the advent of the Carracci.