Allegory of Virtue and Vice

This little panel was never meant to hang on its own. In 1505 Lorenzo Lotto painted it as a cover, a lid that slid over his portrait of Bernardo de' Rossi, the bishop of Treviso. Not long before, someone had tried to have the bishop killed. So when you lifted the cover, the meaning was pointed. On one side a small child settles down among books and instruments to study, climbing toward the light. On the other a drunken satyr sprawls beside spilled wine and broken vessels, and a ship founders on the rocks behind him. The path of learning set against the path of ruin. Lotto was in his mid-twenties and still making his name, and he signed and dated the work on this hidden face.