The Triumph of Chastity

Chastity rides enthroned on a cart drawn by unicorns, crowned with laurel, with Love's quiver and arrows at her feet and Love himself tied up, while young women follow, some of them Virtues and others the chaste heroines of the past. The scene comes from the Triumphs of Petrarch, the 14th-century poems that Florentine painters turned into processions for marriage chests and other furnishings, and behind it lies Florence on a spring day, with the Palazzo della Signoria and the Medici palace.

The art historian Federico Zeri showed in 1971 that this panel belonged with a series of others, most of them once in Genoa with the Adorno family, telling the story in order: Love's chariot, the fight between Love and Chastity now in the National Gallery in London, which has the same height, Chastity's companions and her heroines, and at the ends Love defeated and his spoils carried to the temple of Chastity. The smaller pieces left Genoa in the 1940s and are now dispersed.

This one reached Turin in 1847 as a gift to King Charles Albert, under the name of Botticelli. Mantegna, Benedetto Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli were all proposed later, and the unknown painter was even named the Master of the Triumph of Chastity after it, until Everett Fahy put forward the Florentine illuminator Gherardo di Giovanni in 1967.