An Allegory of Envy,
oil on panel, 44 x 32 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Switzerland

The present woman in profile is a rare and significant survival of renaissance secular art. It is to be interpreted as the personification of Envy, as indicated by the inscription on her headwear.

The painting was probably made within the ambit of Leonardo, in Florence between the final years of the fifteenth and the first of the sixteenth centuries. Indeed, the work reveals numerous points of convergence with the many celebrated caricature drawings, mostly of old men and women, by the master from Vinci (of which many are conserved in Windsor Castle). In these his objective was to capture the varied expressions of the soul, as well as the physical decrepitude that in time gradually takes the human body over. In the present painting the profile pose is especially notable, as it was frequently used in his studies by Leonardo, likewise the anatomical details – the wrinkles of the brow, the loose skin of the neck and even the small wart on the chin – are rendered with intense realism.

These qualities are combined with the stylistic influence of the Florentine painters Lorenzo di Credi who trained in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, thereby being in close association with Leonardo, and Piero di Cosimo, a ‘strange and fantastical’ artist as Vasari described him (‘strano e fantastico’), in whose works are combined a near Flemish interest in realistic detail and an anti-rhetorical fantastical spirit that is frequently lyrical and humorous.

In Florence at the close of the Quattrocento and the opening of the Cinquecento there was a vogue among rich merchants for commissioning decorative cycles for their homes representing mythological and allegorical subjects. The present painting can be contextualised in such a setting as it probably belonged to a series that represented the seven cardinal sins, possibly set in opposition to the theological and cardinal virtues.

The vices had been a subject of contemplation since antiquity, and the challenge they posed was reviewed and revised through the middle-ages by Christianity. Dante considered envy to be a sin that could be redeemed, and thus he placed the envious in Purgatory (Cantos XIII-XIV) where they are purified in the guise of the penitent by being constantly confronted with examples of charity, which is the opposite virtue to the vice of envy.

From an iconographic point of view, the theme of envy was broadly diffused, and it was represented in murals, as well as easel paintings and engravings. Giotto for example, in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, represents this vice as an old woman with a tongue in the form of a serpent and her body engulfed in flames; in an allegorical painting in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice, Giovanni Bellini also personifies this cardinal sin holding a serpent with a forked tongue. In the left side of his celebrated print The Battle of the Sea Monsters Mantegna represented this sin as an emaciated, derelict old woman who clasps an identifying cartouche. All these notions were amply elaborated in the context of Florentine humanism and among the most celebrated examples is the reflection on all the vices of man conducted by Sandro Botticelli in his Calumny of Apelles, in the Uffizi.