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Time Unveiling Truth
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni (Italian, 1708–1787)
1740–45
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 43.3 × 26.5 cm (17 1/16 × 10 7/16 in.); Framed: 52.1 × 35.6 × 3.9 cm (20 1/2 × 14 × 1 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Harold T. Martin Trust
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni crafted a complex mythological scene in this small-scale work, most likely a preparatory sketch for a larger, unexecuted or unknown painting. Father Time pulls aside a large swath of drapery to reveal Truth at the center of the composition, radiating revelatory light from the sun. The figures of Envy, winged and wearing a mask, and Discord, with a writhing tail, lurk in the shadow to the right. Beside Truth stands Justice, holding the pair of scales that signals her impartiality. Last, in the lower right, the personifications of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture hold the tools of their trades.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
