Allegorical Figure of a Woman with a Club (Fortitude?)

In the 1740s a Venetian reception room was lit at night by chandeliers full of candles, and this oval was made for a room like that. Tiepolo painted the woman in greys and creams on a ground of real gold leaf. The Rijksmuseum explains that the four ovals of the set were meant to hang high on the walls, where the gold would catch the candlelight and throw it back into the room. She sits on a cloud with her arm resting on a heavy club. That club is why she is tentatively called Fortitude, the virtue of strength, which painters had long shown with the weapon of Hercules. Her companion, perhaps Prudence, hangs in the same gallery, and two more gold-ground figures thought to belong with them are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.