Filippo Agricola Allegories of the four seasons... Lot 24

Filippo Agricola Allegories of the four seasons with wheel of the zodiac four designs \"(...) In the past, the Zodiac was used as a symbolic system and not with the divinatory and astrological characters of the modern era, and the ancient winged, animic and non-corporeal genies were considered spiritual entities with wings, by virtue of their ability to escape the rigid human categories of space and time. Antecedents to the gods, as a legacy of the primal religions, the animistic ones precisely, the origin of genies dates back to the age when man was little absorbed by the conditioned mind: they were judged above human passions and denoted wisdom, characteristics later transmitted to some major Greek deities, such as Eros, Nike, Hermes, also 'divine' spirits with wings. Having made these iconographic premises, it must be said that the four drawings under consideration, of fine neoclassical linear taste and therefore datable between the end of the 18th and the first decades of the 19th century, may have been created as preparatory for engravings intended for a poetic-celebratory book work, or as parts of a project for the pictorial decoration of an interior. They certainly arose in connection with a culture that was widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among the more educated and wealthy classes, embracing the very ancient belief that all human activity is inexorably influenced by astrology, the 'ancestor' of astronomy, as well as exalting ritual themes of hermetic, alchemical and spagyric operations. These are highly complex, composite and articulated symbologies but widely known and popularized until before the birth of modern science. (...)\" W. 105 - H. 295 mm pen, brown ink and watercolor on squared paper Expertise Dott.ssa Nicosetta Roio \"(...) In the past, the Zodiac was used as a symbolic system and not with the divinatory and astrological characters of modern times, and the ancient winged, animic and non-corporeal genies were considered spiritual entities with wings, by virtue of their ability to escape the rigid human categories of space and time. Antecedents to the gods, as a legacy of the primal religions, the animistic ones precisely, the origin of genies dates back to the age when man was little absorbed by the conditioned mind: they were judged above human passions and denoted wisdom, characteristics later transmitted to some major Greek deities, such as Eros, Nike, Hermes, also 'divine' spirits with wings. Having made these iconographic premises, it must be said that the four drawings under consideration, of fine neoclassical linear taste and therefore datable between the end of the 18th and the first decades of the 19th century, may have been created as preparatory for engravings intended for a poetic-celebratory book work, or as parts of a project for the pictorial decoration of an interior. They certainly arose in connection with a culture that was widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among the more educated and wealthy classes, embracing the very ancient belief that all human activity is inexorably influenced by astrology, the 'ancestor' of astronomy, as well as exalting ritual themes of hermetic, alchemical and spagyric operations. These are highly complex, composite and articulated symbologies but widely known and popularized until before the birth of modern science. (...)\"