Sunrise on a Pastoral Landscape: Apollo and the Hours

In this lush river landscape, a pair of shepherds tend their flock of sheep as Apollo, the sun god, ushers in a new day on his chariot. He is surrounded by frolicking female figures, who represent the Hours, and led by Aurora, the goddess of dawn. She appears seated below some floating putti, guiding the horses toward the distant horizon. The Bolognese painter Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi arrived in Rome around 1626 and remained there most of his career. A landscape specialist, he worked in fresco and oil painting and often incorporated ancient buildings into his idyllic worlds. As the late art historian Norman Canedy observed, the overgrown remnant of a Corinthian temple façade depicted here at right “can be identified as the Temple of Castor and Pollux, the heroic twins who after miraculously saving Rome appeared to the Romans at a fountain in the Forum. With the living waters still flowing as yet another new day is breaking, this ruined Roman shrine complex gives venerable voice to historical Time.”