Time defending Truth against the attacks of Envy and Discord

This canvas was made to be seen from below. In 1641 Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII's chief minister, ordered it for the ceiling of the Grand Cabinet in his Paris residence, the Palais-Cardinal, known today as the Palais-Royal. That July a prince of the royal blood, the comte de Soissons, had taken up arms against the cardinal and was killed at the battle of La Marfée. The Louvre reads the ceiling as a political allegory of Richelieu's work kept safe from its enemies. Winged old Time lifts the naked figure of Truth into the sky, away from Discord on the left, with a dagger and a torch, and Envy on the right, with snakes for hair. A small child flies alongside with Time's scythe and a snake biting its own tail. Richelieu died at the end of 1642 and the palace passed to the crown. The painting was first shaped as a four-lobed panel, and took its present full circle when the canvas was relined in 1957.