Finding Ovid through Raphael in the Schools of the Tombs

In 1674 a tomb decorated with murals was discovered on the Via Flaminia in Rome, which on the basis of inscriptions was wrongly identified as Ovid’s tomb. Pietro Santi Bartoli, an ardent frequenter of the ‘Schools of the Tombs’, preserved the mural designs in prints published in 1680 as Le pitture antiche del sepolcro de’ Nasoni. These prints form part of Bartoli’s dual project to record the vestiges of Roman art and to recover the parergonal elements of Raphael’s works; a dialogue between ancient and modern in which differences of historical context and artistic accomplishment were effaced by the bland reproductive style of the etchings. Bartoli’s prints of the tomb paintings were accompanied by a remarkable iconographical exegesis by Giovanni Pietro Bellori, in which he identified Ovid’s portrait and elucidated the pictorial cycle’s concern with the soul’s journey after death. The similarities with Bellori’s readings of picture cycles by Raphael, Annibale Carracci and Nicolas Poussin are discussed here, together with the theme of the tomb in his writings