Study for Angels Sealing the Foreheads of the Children of Israel in Saint Peter's Basilica 1652

Pietro da Cortona made this drawing with black chalk on paper as a study for a fresco in Saint Peter's Basilica. Produced in the mid-seventeenth century, this image creates meaning through its references to biblical history and the traditions of the Catholic Church, powerfully reasserting itself after the Protestant Reformation. This drawing embodies the Counter-Reformation's renewed emphasis on religious art's power to inspire and instruct the faithful. Cortona’s Rome was a city remaking itself through art and architecture, heavily funded by the papal state. Artists such as Cortona were essentially public servants, enlisted to produce grand spectacles of faith and power. To understand this work fully, we'd need to delve into the religious and political history of the period. Resources like Papal archives, artists' biographies, and studies of Counter-Reformation art would help us to understand the social conditions that shaped its production and the institutions that promoted it. The meaning of art is always contingent on its social and institutional context.