Minerva Turning from Scenes of Destruction and Violence to Religion and the Arts

Date

ca. 1805

Creator

This late etching was published as the frontispiece to Francis Borroughs’s A Poetical Epistle to James Barry, Esq. (London, 1805). Here Barry shows the figure of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, in a pose based on Raphael’s cartoon Feed My Sheep, in her role as protector of the arts. She indicates with a downturned hand scenes on her right of violence, depravity, and destruction under an ominous, heavily cross-hatched sky; with an open left hand she gestures to scenes of virtue, epitomized by agriculture and the arts—music, books, painting, and the Three Graces dancing in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral. [William L.] Pressly notes that in the print Barry carelessly reversed the scene in the original drawing in which, more appropriately, the scenes of horror appear on Minerva’s left and those of virtue on her right (Life and Art, p. 184). He also observes that while Minerva traditionally had the power to protect virtue from vice and corruption, Barry here presents her as offering a choice "and one senses that Barry is again specifically referring to the contemporary situation. The figure singing and playing the harp...is surely not only a second Orpheus flourishing in a peaceful age but also a hopeful Ireland singing of a harmonious future" (ibid., 185). from Bindman, No Cross, No Crown: Prints by James Barry from the Collection of William L. and Nancy Pressly (Notre Dame, 2016)