Aldobrandini Wedding

Until the 19th century, this was one of the few and most influential paintings from the early Roman empire, and generated much interest and scholarship, including engravings by Pietro Santi Bartoli (1635–1700), and attention by Winckelmann, Karl Böttiger, and others.

At the foot of the bed a young half-naked man (Hymen, god of marriage), with a cloak wrapped around his waist and head wreathed with ivy, lies on the doorstep and observes the scene that takes place at his right.

These interpretations were pre-eminent until 1994, when Frank Müller proposed a scene from the play Hippolytus by Euripides as a guide for the correct reading of the fresco.

Setting aside these mythologic-literary interpretations, it is clear that the sequence relates to a wedding, with a focus on the universal anxiety experienced by a young bride, comforted and supported by Venus, waiting to meet the bridegroom and lose her virginity.

The two side scenes help to integrate this interpretation; the scene on the left, with the matron that controls the temperature of the water in the basin, probably alludes to the ceremony of accepting the bride in her husband's house (aqua et igni accipi, acceptance of water and fire) according to the Roman tradition of deductio in domum mariti, while the scene on the right, is interpreted as a sacrifice for auspicious fortune, possibly in the presence of the recumbent god (Hymen) as the lyre plays the wedding song that accompanied the bride into her new home.