The Triumph of Chastity: Love Disarmed and Bound

In 1509 Pandolfo Petrucci, lord of Siena, married his son Borghese to Vittoria Piccolomini, a niece of the late Pope Pius III, and a room in his palace was painted to mark it. A lesson for a bride suited the occasion. This scene comes from Petrarch, the 14th-century poet, whose Triumphs show one power beaten by the next, Love by Chastity, Chastity in turn by Death.

Love here is a naked boy with wings of many colours, and he has been caught. Chastity, in white with her hair plaited, is Petrarch's Laura, and she ties him up with ropes. Two faithful women of antiquity help her. Penelope, who waited 20 years for Odysseus, breaks his bow, and Lucretia pulls the feathers from his wing. Roman soldiers look on, and a walled town sits in the hills behind.

Under Love's bent knee Signorelli unrolled a scroll and signed it Coritius, the man from Cortona. The ceiling of the same room, gilded stucco set with 20 small mythological scenes, is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.