Alliance of Peace and Abundance

Alliance of Peace and Abundance, 1642. Bartolommeo Coriolano (Italian), after Guido Reni (Italian, 1575–1642). Chiaroscuro woodcut. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Dudley P. Allen Fund, 1923.77

Created in 1642 during the Baroque period, this work belongs firmly within the daily life tradition. Bartolommeo Coriolano worked at a moment when the rivalry between Catholic Baroque drama and Protestant restraint reshaped what a painting could mean. Every gesture, fabric, and gleam of light was decoded by contemporary viewers like a private language.

The physical object — chiaroscuro woodcut, Unknown — carries its own history of handling and restoration. Bartolommeo Coriolano's brushwork here moves between exacting description and looser, more suggestive passages, a balance typical of Baroque studio practice.

Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. Scenes like this were prized precisely because they made ordinary labor and leisure worth painting at all.

Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland now holds the work, where conservators and historians continue to revisit its condition and attribution. Each generation of scholarship adds a layer to how Bartolommeo Coriolano's output from this period is understood.

“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”