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As patron, Ferdinando de' Medici embraced the Rococo more directly: he had lived in Venice, and he turned to such Venetians as Sebastiano Ricci. whose sumptuous Love Punished, with its riot of firm pink nudes in the rinsed blue empyrean, scans like a prophecy of Tiepolo and Boucher. The theme of love or Cupid's being chastised or having his feathers plucked off crops up so often in late Medicean painting that one wonders whether it had something to do with the high incidence of syphilis among the nobility; Ferdinando's own death was hastened by it.
With The Rape of Europa, by Giovanni Domenico Ferretti, it seems clear that the Baroque—with its flamboyant drama—is over. Ferretti's Europa is not being abducted by the bull; she is posturing like a courtesan doll on the back of a cow that belongs, in spirit, to Marie Antoinette's palace dairy. What effect, if any, such elegant fancies might have had on the populace of Florence is unknown. But in any case, Ferretti's work, like everything else in this show, is based on the unclosable gap between art and life—and, after 250 years, is none the worse for it.
Robert Hughes