While performing graduate research on the Gallery, Thomas Hoving, later director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, pointed out many correspondences between the frescoes and items in the famous Farnese Collection of Roman sculpture.

[2] In 1597, Carracci began to decorate the Gallery with scenes depicting the loves of the gods set within frames (quadri riportati) and faux bronze medallions painted on an illusionistic architectural framework referred to as quadratura.

Accordingly, a crown of immortal laurel is resplendent overhead amid brilliant light, demonstrating that victory over the irrational appetites raises men up to heaven.Hoving saw it differently.

In his memoir, he writes:[2] My lucky discovery destroyed the accepted interpretation of Annibale's fresco cycle as a "Neo-Platonic visual essay about celestial love's supremacy over physical passion."

The paintings were actually both an entertaining celebration of a bunch of randy Olympians hitting on each other and also an up-scale mind game paying homage to Odoardo's fine antiquities collection.In addition to the putti shown at the four corners, The Loves of the Gods are depicted on the vault in thirteen narrative scenes.

[5] The program refers to Ovid's Metamorphoses (VIII; lines 160-182) and the spirit alludes to contemporary images voiced, for example, in a carnival song-poem written by Lorenzo de' Medici in about 1475, that entreats:[6] Quest’è Bacco ed Arïanna, belli, e l'un de l'altro ardenti: perché ’l tempo fugge e inganna, sempre insieme stan contenti.

The dual classicizing and baroque tendencies in this work would fuel the debate by the next generation of fresco painters, between Sacchi and Pietro da Cortona, over the number of figures to be included in a painting.

In contrast, a few years later, artists such as Caravaggio and his followers would rebel against representing spatial depth in colour and light, and introduce tenebrous dramatic realism into their art instead.

Later followers of Neoclassic formalism and severity frowned on the excesses of Annibale Carracci, but in his day, he would have been seen as masterful in achieving the supreme approximation to classic beauty in the tradition of Raphael and Giulio Romano's secular frescoes in the Loggia of the Villa Farnesina.