The Mocking of Ceres: a nocturnal scene with Ceres drinking from a jug of water given to her by Stellio at right 1633

Bernardino Capitelli made this etching called ‘The Mocking of Ceres’ in Rome in 1637. It shows a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but it’s also making a comment on social conditions of its own time. The classical story tells of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, who is thirsty and asks an old woman for water. Stellio mocks her as she drinks. Ceres, angered by this insult, throws the dregs of the drink in his face, turning him into a star-spotted lizard. It’s interesting to think of the place of mythological images like this in seventeenth-century Rome. The art academy taught artists that classical sources offered timeless models of beauty, but an image like this could also be seen as a critique of the period’s rigid social hierarchies. Who is mocking whom, and what are the politics of class at play here? As art historians, we can look at how the Academy shaped artistic production, but we can also examine the imagery itself for traces of political dissent and social commentary.