0000AldobrandiniMisfits

The Aldobrandini Misfits, 1st-century BC Roman frescoes from "an ancient villa at Tor Marancia" (more precise context unknown), displayed in Vatican Museums, Vatican Library, Aldobrandini Room (Room X)

A series of six fresco portraits of unhappy young women from mythology are preserved without their original context. 5 are named, one is not. Each may well have been cut from a 2nd Style decorative context.

Helbig calls it "the gallery of mythical fair women promient for their crimes and misfortunes in love." He considered them copies of good originals of stereotyped subjects of Alexandrian art, according to D. Sladen, The Secrets of the Vatican (London 1907), 338. [googlebooks]

Canace is the only member of the group not treated at all in Ovid's Metamorphoses, though Pasiphae has only a minor appearance in the poem.

These frescoes appear to have no connection whatever to the Aldobrandini Wedding, which hangs in the same room; nor do the well known Esquiline fresco landscapes of Odysseus and Laestrygonians and other scenes in the same room have any connection whatever. We should like to know more about the context from which this set of five frescoes was taken.

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