‘L celeste e ‘l vulgare Amore instituiti da Platone:’ Bellori’s Interpretation of Annibale Carracci’s Theme of Love in the Farnese Gallery

In 1672 Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Annibale Carracci’s biographer, published a comprehensive study of the Carracci’s paintings in the Farnese Gallery, interpreting Annibale’s ceiling as expressing a conception of “heavenly and common love formulated by Plato.” Charles Dempsey, a pivotal twentieth-century scholar disagrees with Bellori’s interpretation and replaces it with Virgil’s verse “omnia vincit Amor,” suggesting that idea of “Love conquers all” expresses the spirit of the ceiling. In this paper, I follow Bellori’s interpretation and argue that he understood Annibale’s depictions of same-sex love, pederasty, marriage, and sexual gratification as allusions to Pausanias’s heavenly and common Aphrodite in Plato’s Symposium.