Triumph of Chastity

Around 1530, when this was painted, Petrarch's long poem the Triumphs was already two centuries old and still a fixture in Italian households, a sequence in which Love is defeated by Chastity, Chastity by Death, and so on up to Eternity. Lotto takes the first of those reversals. A woman in a dark green robe and white veil drives off Venus and her son Cupid, who tumble away half undressed. She holds a bow, ready to defend herself, and a small white weasel rides at her breast, in the emblem books of the day a creature tied to purity. The half-naked Venus is lifted almost directly from an ancient Roman sarcophagus that Lotto could have studied in Rome. Panels like this were often made as marriage gifts, hung to remind a bride of the virtue expected of her.