Achilles And The Daughters Of Lycomedes - Gerolamo Piola (1666 - 1724)

Painting oil on canvas measuring 173 x 273 cm without frame and 176 x 276cm with a small frame on the support depicting Achilles and theDaughters of Lycomedes by the painter Paolo Gerolamo Piola ( Genoa1666 - 1724 ).

Various ancient sources, including Ovid'spopular Metamorphoses, narrate the episode of Achilles depicted inthe Baroque period, which sees him in an act that is anything butheroic dressed in women's clothes.

Thetis, knowing that hewould die if he went to fight at Troy, made him wear women's clothesand entrusted him to King Lycomedes. With the latter's daughtersAchilles also entertained himself when Odysseus and Menelaus arrived,sent to Scyrus by Agamemnon to seek him out.
They broughttypically feminine gifts, but also a sword and a shield, whichAchilles instinctively held when the trumpets sounded, revealing hisidentity.

The playful scene lends itself well to thetheatricality of the Genoese Baroque; thus Paolo Gerolamo Piola tookadvantage of this to crowd the moulded canvas narrating this storywith no less than nine figures.

Looking at the painting, wecannot help but fall in love with the figure of Achilles, with abright red feather in his hair, wrapped in a luminous blue cloak.This figure is very close to one of Paolo Gerolamo Piola's mosticonic figures, the marvellous Salome formerly Canesso and nowBaratti.

This amazing and unpublished painting was exhibitedin Genoa at the exhibition Barocco Nascosto held between March andJuly 2022, and published in a corresponding catalogue.