Follower of Paolo Veronese (Verona, 1528 – Venice, 1588), Allegory of Wisdom and Strength

Follower of Paolo Veronese (Verona, 1528 – Venice, 1588)

Allegory of wisdom and strength

Oil on canvas, 48 x 36,5 cm

Frame, 61 x 48 cm

The Allegory of Wisdom and Strength is a painting made in 1565 in Venice by Paolo Veronese and currently housed at the Frick Collection in New York. The Allegory of Wisdom and Strength and the Allegory of Virtue and Vice have gone through the same events since their creation, passing through numerous owners and collections. Because of this, several scholars have hypothesized that Veronese painted the canvases as a pair. In 1970, Edgar Munhall was the first to suggest that they were simply completed at the same time, but that they were not a pendant. Studies conducted by experts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the XNUMXs have confirmed this thesis: scholars have discovered that the artist used different materials for the support of each painting, adopted a different composition of the motifs and an equally different methodology in the elaboration of the sky. These discrepancies led scholars to believe that the paintings were conceived individually, as works independent of each other. Furthermore, the conclusion was supported by the visual analysis of the two canvases as a whole: it is clearly perceived that they do not complement each other, as would have been the case if they were a pair of paintings. Since its creation in Venice in the second half of the XNUMXth century, this work has been owned by Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg, Queen Christina of Sweden, the Odescalchi family; then it was part of the Orleans Collection of Philip II of Bourbon-Orléans and subsequently belonged to various English owners and art dealers, until it reached the Frick Collection in New York. The painting, of monumental dimensions, has an allegorical subject: in fact, the personification of Wisdom is represented on the left and Hercules, who symbolizes Strength and earthly concerns on the right. The conflict between divine and mortal matters is a central theme of the work. In the scene, the virtuosity of divine Wisdom appears to triumph over the earthly desires of Hercules: in fact, the woman, whose gaze is turned to the sky, is flooded with light and almost seems to be captured in a moment of elevation; on the contrary, the figure of Hercules, who looks down, in the direction of the jewels on the ground, tends to assume a descending position and is enveloped in a dark shadow. The allegorical genre is unusual both in comparison with the famous canvases of historical and biblical subjects by Veronese, and in comparison with other less formal works by other Venetian artists of the Renaissance such as Giorgione or Titian. This work, together with the Allegory of Vice and Virtue, is believed to be among the first of this genre created by Caliari.

There are various contemporary or slightly later copies of the painting, which testify to its enormous visual success in the Venetian context: the particularity and unusualness of this iconography certainly attracted the attention of the ramified group of figures that moved around the painter Paolo Veronese, who was able to build a populous and industrious workshop around himself.

The object is in good condition