The Triumph of Galetea

The sea-nymph Galatea skims the waves on a shell drawn by dolphins, her red cloak snapping behind her, ringed by tritons seizing nymphs and cupids loosing arrows of love from the clouds. Everything spins around her in balanced, buoyant motion, yet she turns her gaze serenely upward, the still heart of the whirl. Raphael frescoed her for the banker Agostino Chigi's riverside villa, and when asked where he had found so beautiful a model, he replied that he worked instead from a certain idea of beauty carried in his mind. It is the High Renaissance dream of pagan loveliness, perfectly poised.