Harmony (The Three Graces?)

The Prado dates this panel between 1541 and 1544, Baldung's last years in Strasbourg, a city that had gone over to the Reformation while he held office in its government. What he made is an allegory, and nobody has settled what it shows. The museum keeps a question mark in the title.

Three nude women stand under a laurel tree in a wood at night. Three putti are with them, one holding a sheet of music, and a swan and stringed instruments are nearby, all of it pointing to harmony and poetry. A snake is coiled around the laurel.

The panel has a companion of exactly the same size, on the ages of life and death. A Latin inscription on the back, now lost, recorded the two being handed over as a gift at Frankfurt in January 1547, two years after Baldung had died, and an inventory of the royal palace in Madrid describes them closing one against the other like a diptych.

In 1834 this panel was listed as number five in the Sala Reservada, the room Ferdinand VII had ordered for pictures of doubtful decency. It was dismantled four years later.